13 ms·

OpenClaw isn't fooling me. I remember MS-DOS

307 points by feigewalnuss 6mo ago

maxbeech 6mo ago
[dead]
piker 6mo ago
Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks? I just personally have zero interest in letting an AI into my comms and see no value there whatsoever. Probably negative.
- _pdp_ 6mo ago
  There is value but it is hard to discover and extract outside of a few known areas - like coding, etc.
  - piker 6mo ago
    Yes, I can see the (potential) value in working with agents in software development. The “claw” movement I understood to suggest value in less constrained access to my inbox, personal messages, calendar etc like some sort of PA. It’s hard to quantify how much damage a bad PA can do to someone’s personal and professional life, so if my understand is correct, this seems like a dead end.
    - _pdp_ 6mo ago
      I posted this comment in another thread so reposting it here because it seems to be on topic. --- IMHO, the biggest problem with OpenClaw and other AI agents is that the use-cases are still being discovered. We have deployed several hundred of these to customers and I think this challenge comes from the fact that AI agents are largely perceived as workflow automation tools so when it comes to business process they are seen as a replacement for more established frameworks. They can automate but they are not reliable. I think of them as work and process augmentation tools but this is not how most customers think in my experience. However, here are a several legit use-case that we use internally which I can freely discuss. There is an experimental single-server dev infrastructure we are working on that is slightly flaky. We deployed a lightweight agent in go (single 6MB binary) that connects to our customer-facing API (we have our own agentic platform) where the real agent is sitting and can be reconfigured. The agent monitors the server for various health issues. These could be anything from stalled VMs, unexpected errors etc. It is firecracker VMs that we use in very particular way and we don't know yet the scope of the system. When such situations are detected the agent automatically corrects the problems. It keeps of log what it did in a reusable space (resource type that we have) under a folder called learnings. We use these files to correct the core issues when we have the type to work on the code. We have an AI agent called Studio Bot. It exists in Slack. It wakes up multiple times during the day. It analyses our current marketing efforts and if it finds something useful, it creates the graphics and posts to be sent out to several of our social media channels. A member of staff reviews these suggestions. Most of the time they need to follow up with subsequent request to change things and finally push the changes to buffer. I also use the agent to generate branded cover images for linkedin, x and reddit articles in various aspect ratios. It is a very useful tool that produces graphics with our brand colours and aesthetics but it is not perfect. We have a customer support agent that monitors how well we handle support request in zendesk. It does not automatically engage with customers. What it does is to supervise the backlog of support tickets and chase the team when we fall behind, which happens. We have quite a few more scattered in various places. Some of them are even public. In my mind, the trick is to think of AI agents as augmentation tools. In other words, instead of asking how can I take myself out of the equation, the better question is how can I improve the situation. Sometimes just providing more contextually relevant information is more than enough. Sometimes, you need a simple helper that own a certain part of the business. I hope this helps.
      - bsenftner 6mo ago
        Great information post. don't let the AI fad boi's down votes lead you to think this is not a very worthwhile contribution.
      - esseph 6mo ago
        > They can automate but they are not reliable. This is why I won't use them for anything externally facing or with high or even moderate damage potential. Which basically means they don't get used at all.
        _pdp_ 6mo ago
        This is my point ... it is a change of perspective. They are best suited for cooperation for now.
      - eucyclos 6mo ago
        Weird that you're being downvoted for sharing anecdata on actual use cases. It's as if there's a desire to downplay the positive aspects of this technology in the HN community.
- TheDong 6mo ago
  I find some value as kinda a better alexa. I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things. I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday" I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay. It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
  - coldtea 6mo ago
    Regarding Alexa, none of those use cases sound that useful to have an ever-present listening device at home, except if one is bedbound or something.
  - puelocesar 6mo ago
    180 grand a month for PA is a lot of money. But I guess each person has its own priority. I mean, I can pay a very fancy gym with that price instead of the shitty popular one I go, which would probably improve my well being much more than asking to play Gorillaz
    - quietbritishjim 6mo ago
      "a grand" means a thousand (dollars or pounds or whatever). $180k / month really would be a lot of money. I'd be your PA for that!
      - puelocesar 6mo ago
        ok, now I wish there was an edit button. Thanks for noticing the mistake though
  - tikotus 6mo ago
    I don't want to be judgemental, but I do find it funny that you're paying $180 for this convenience, and use it to pirate movies.
- onchainintel 6mo ago
  It all depends on what you do aka your use case. If you're in the content creatio business, which is part of my responsibilities, then yes has been massively helpful. For other roles, I can absolutely see no use case or benefit. Context matters, like with everything.
- iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
  Eh, buddy says he uses them for his network and, apparently, some light IT maintenance for his family members. So far it seems to be working for him. I am not that brave.
- mathgladiator 6mo ago
  Agent environments like OpenClaw are in the toy phase, and OpenClaw is teaching people how to build things with agents in a toy-like and unreliable way. I used my understanding of OpenClaw to build scalable + secure + auditable agent infrastructure in my platform such that I can build products that other people can use.
  - bayindirh 6mo ago
    We had better agent infrastructures (namely JADE) back in the day. I worked with them, and now these things look like flimsy 50¢ plastic toys to me, too.
- ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
  I see the appeal, but I also see the risks. If you ignore the risks I don't see why it's hard to see value. The AI can read all your email, that's useful. It can delete them to free up space after deciding they are useless. It can push to GitHub. The more of your private info and passwords you give it the more useful it becomes. That's all great, until it isn't. Putting firewalls in place is probably possible and obviously desirable but is a bit of a hassle and will probably reduce the usefulness to some degree, so people won't. We'll all collectively touch the stove and find out that it is hot.
  - theshrike79 6mo ago
    Just limit the tooling. There's no reason for the AI to be able to delete emails for example. I built a fastmail CLI tool for my *claw and it can only read mails, that's it. I might give it the ability to archive and label later on, with a separate log of actions so I can undo any operation it did easily. It's pretty decent at going "hey, there's a sale on $thing at $store", for mails, but that's about it.
  - greedo 6mo ago
    Deleting email to free up space has to be the most ridiculous justification for burning up the environment.
- vbezhenar 6mo ago
  Many wealthy people use human assistants to offload mundane work. This is cheap replacement for ordinary people. It's going to be big. But probably it's best to wait for Google and Apple to step up their assistants.
  - lionkor 6mo ago
    Those human assistants can be held accountable.
    - sekh60 6mo ago
      I deleted your calendar, I'm sorry.
      - lionkor 6mo ago
        But you BET that person is never, ever making that mistake again!
  - piker 6mo ago
    Yes, and that's because the workflow of those people generally requires managing a crazy, dynamic schedule including travel, meetings, comms, etc. Those folks need real humans with long-term memories and incentives to establish trust for managing these high-stakes engagements. Their human assistants might find these things useful, but there's zero chance Bill Gates is having an AI schedule his travel plans or draft his text messages. OTOH, this isn't an issue for "ordinary people". They go to work, school, children's sports events, etc. If they had an assistant for free, most of them would probably find it difficult to generate enough volume to establish the muscle memory of using them. In my own professional life, this occurred with junior lawyers and legal assistants--the juniors just never found them useful because they didn't need them even though they were available. Even the partners ended up consolidating around sharing a few of them for the same reason. Down in this thread someone mentions it being an advanced Alexa, which seems apt. Yes, a party novelty but not useful enough to be top of mind in the every day work flow.
    - 6mo ago
- dankobgd 6mo ago
  no, it's only for scammers
- pjmlp 6mo ago
  Same here, I care to the extent I am obligated to, and staying relevant for finding a job.
- rimliu 6mo ago
  I am also surprised by the number of people willing to outsource their lives.
  - eucyclos 6mo ago
    Just the boring bits. I don't need openclaw to lounge by a pool thinking about macro trends for me.
- andai 6mo ago
  It's pretty much just Claude Code, except hooked up to your Telegram / WhatsApp / iMessage. I don't know why they don't make an official integration for it. Probably cause they're already out of GPUs lol
  - edschofield 6mo ago
    Claude Code does now have integration with Telegram, Discord, and iMessage as of a few weeks ago: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels I haven't used OpenClaw since then ...
- jstummbillig 6mo ago
  > letting an AI into my comms Idk, it's strange for me to think of it that way. It's tech. If it does something useful, that's cool. Data protection is always a consideration. I just don't consider a LLM to be a special case or a person, the same way that I don't have strong feelings about "AI" being applied in google search since forever. I don't have special feelings or get embarrassed by the thought of a LLM touching my mails. Right now for me, agentic coding is great. I have a hard time seeing a future where the benefits that we experience there will not be more broadly shared. Explorations in that direction is how we get there.
  - rowanG077 6mo ago
    The problem for me is not the LLM reading it. The problem is the company behind it can most likely recover the sessions. That is a problem since they could share it with whomever they want. Even if they are fully incorruptable it's also not uncommon that they simply get hacked and all this data ends up on the open market.
  - piker 6mo ago
    My issues aren’t really with privacy so much as what the failure modes look like, and, more fundamentally, with becoming a passenger to my own life.
- littlecranky67 6mo ago
  I can see a value in a smarter email-inbox sorting algorithm - but only because all major players (except google which I don't trust with my mails) have abandoned bayesian email filtering with training. This was standard in 2005 in such basic clients such as the Opera browser, but somehow we lost this technology along the way.
  - Terr_ 6mo ago
    I can't recall the name, but I vaguely remember a Bayesian spam filter for arbitrary POP3 accounts in the 2000s that had a local web frontend, and how excited I was at its effectiveness. I believe that the shift from "my one computer" to multiple clients (computer + phone + webmail) probably has something to do with it. Even with IMAP sharing state, you still don't have a great way to see and control the filtering, except by moving things in/out of spam folders.
  - easygenes 6mo ago
    I was an original Thunderbird pre-1.0 (from 2003) user and prior to that, Netscape Mail, and am quite certain it has had bayesian spam filtering all this time, at least since the late ‘90s. That was a headline feature in the early days. My first email account used POP3 through a shared web host for my own domain in that era. Edit: Yes it’s still there https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-sp...
- pizza234 6mo ago
  > Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks? Mostly (but of course, not exclusively), porn for the techies. Receiving a phone notification every time a PR is opened on a project of yours? Exciting or sad, depends on one's outlook on life.
  - moffkalast 6mo ago
    I thought emails from github already did that?
    - mgkimsal 6mo ago
      I think the more useful part is the parts that checks a ticket, fixes a bug, then opens the PR automatically. Whether you get an email or a phone text or call from a voice agent is ... somewhat secondary, im.
      - moffkalast 6mo ago
        Fixes a bug, yeah that's some wishful thinking right there. I don't think it counts if it adds three new ones in the process.
        eucyclos 6mo ago
        If it added four last month I'd say it absolutely counts. Trends often matter more than position.
- surgical_fire 6mo ago
  No. But I am someone that, for example, dislikes home automation. Know that thing that you ask Alexa to open your curtains? I think that is cringe af. Maybe there's an overlap with the crowd that likes that.
- stingraycharles 6mo ago
  This is being asked on pretty much every Openclaw thread, and the use cases brought up seem roughly similar: digital assistant. It of course depends heavily on your work, but my work is 50% communication / overseeing, and I simply lose track of everything. I don’t give it any credentials of any sort, but I run data pipelines on an hourly basis that ingest into the agent’s workspace.
- cl0ckt0wer 6mo ago
  Mostly it's fun. It'll so some light infra management for me too.
- coldtea 6mo ago
  Newb technies love it.
- mark_l_watson 6mo ago
  I ran OpenClaw in a container, on a VPS without connection to messaging systems, so perhaps that is why I didn't get value. Similarly, I have been using Hermes Agent also inside a container, and on a VPS with only access to a local directory in the VPS with a dozen active projects on GitHub. I don't give it access to my GitHub credentials, but allow it to work in whatever branch is checked out. This setup is fabulously productive. I use it about every other day to perform some meaningful task for me. It is inexpensive also. A task might take 20 minutes and cost $0.25 in GLP-5.1 API costs. So TLDR: out of the box, I use Hermes at least one hour a week and find it to be a wonderful tool.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- bitmasher9 6mo ago
  Yep, I’m seeing real value. I use them for tasks that an assistant might have done in the past. It’s much cheaper than hiring a human, and setup is much faster than finding a good assistant. I’m honestly considering giving it access to accounts with payment information so it can book flights and hotels for me. You can ask it questions like “what classes does my gym offer between 6-8pm today” and just get a good answer instead of wasting time finding their schedule. You can tell it to check your favorite band’s website everyday to see if they announce any shows in your city. You can tell it to read your emails and automatically add important information to your calendar. This isn’t the space where I get the most value from AI, but it’s nice to have a hyper connected agent that can quickly take care of more smaller and more personal tasks.
  - piker 6mo ago
    No offense but all of those are near zero value except entertainment to the orchestrator. That’s without understanding the failure rate and modes. It’s telling that you haven’t yet given it your credit card.
    - bitmasher9 6mo ago
      I would agree that the value is low. It’s the type of thing I wouldn’t pay $20/hr to have a human do, if you want to put a value cap on this type of activity.
- jillesvangurp 6mo ago
  I talk to a lot of business people that are interested in automating very basic things in their inbox, on their Google drive, in CRMs, etc. The reason is not that they want to be cool and hip but because they are forced to spend lots of their precious time doing very dull and repetitive things. Promising to take some of that pain away is a really easy sell. Hence all the hype around OpenClaw. If you look around in the business world, there is an absurdly large number of people still doing all sorts of things manually that they probably shouldn't. And its costing them money. Even before AI that was true. But now it's increasingly becoming obvious to these people that there are solutions out there that might work. There's a fair amount of FOMO on that front with more clued in people that have heard of other people allegedly being a bit smarter than them. From a practical experience point of view, most people probably don't have the hands-on experience to make a good judgment just yet. "I tried Chat GPT once and it hallucinated" doesn't really count as valid experience at this point and many non-technical people are still at that level. There generally are a lot of headless chickens making absurd claims (either way) about what these systems can and cannot do making sweeping statements about how possible or impossible things are. If you take the time and sit down to automate a few things you'll find that: 1) the tools aren't great right now 2) there are lots of basic plumbing issues that get in the way 3) fixing those plumbing issues is not rocket science and something anyone with basic CLI or scripting skills can solve easily 4) you can actually outsource most of that stuff to coding agents. 5) if you figure some of the basics out, you can actually make OpenClaw or similar systems do things that are valuable. 6) Most people that aren't programmers won't get very far given the current state of tools. 7) this might change rapidly as better tools become available. 8) people generally lack the imagination to see how even basic solutions could work for them with these systems. I have an OpenClaw up and running for our company. It is doing some basic things that are useful for us. After solving some basic plumbing issues, it's now a lot easier to make it do new things. It's not quite doing everything just yet (lots more plumbing issues to solve) and we have our healthy hesitations about letting it loose on our inboxes. But it's not useless or without value. Every plumbing issue we solve unlocks a few more use cases. There's a bit of a gold rush right now of course. And "picks and shovels" people like myself are probably going to do a brisk business. You can wait it out or tap into the action now. That's your choice. But try making it an informed choice. And no better experience than the first-hand type.
- seniorThrowaway 6mo ago
  Yes, they are good at being coding "interns". They work together in slack which allows management visibility and tasking directly to them. i.e. people who aren't going to be managing a bunch of claude code's all day. I say interns because they are incredibly smart at some things like implementing well defined coding plans and incredibly dumb in other ways, like shipping non-compiling code and asking a human to troubleshoot. To do this requires thoughtful setup, you have to onboard them more like you would a human than a piece of software. Give them their own "workstation", accounts etc. Limit what they can do in those accounts, not in their .md files or skills or anything, they will never follow those 100%, just like a person won't follow directions 100% of the time.
trilogic 6mo ago
Great article. Been skeptical of it since the beginning with this Python "Cli" agents. Been looking for local ai driven Agentic GUI that offers real privacy but coulnt find it anywhere. Finally what we call real local and ClI agents pipeline local ai driven with llama.cpp engine is done. Just pure bash and c++, model isolated, no http, no python, no api, no proprietary models. There is the native version (in c++) and the community version in Electron. Is electron Good enough to protect users Wrapping all the rest? This is exciting.
nopurpose 6mo ago
I agree that sandboxing whole agent is inadequate: I am fine sharing my github creds with the gh CLI, but not with the npm. More granular sunboxing and permission is what I'd like to see and this project seems interesting enough to have a closer look. I am not interested in the "claw" workflow, but if I can use it for a safer "code" environment it is a win for me.
- mkesper 6mo ago
  When the agent uses your GH credentials to nuke all your projects or put out a lot of crap, this separation will not save you.
  - nopurpose 6mo ago
    whitelisting `gh` args should solve it. Event opencode's primitive permission system allows that.
    - tredre3 6mo ago
      The ability to whitelist specific args for commands has been the source of several (countless?) sudo CVEs over the years.
electroglyph 6mo ago
https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/ https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/
falense 6mo ago
Very cool project! I am working on something similar myself. I call mine TriOnyx. Its based on Simon Willison's lethal trifecta. You get a star from me :D https://www.tri-onyx.com/ https://www.tri-onyx.com/
repelsteeltje 6mo ago
One could argue that the discussion is once again about tech debt. Both OpenClaw and MSDOS gaining a lot a traction by taking short cuts, ignoring decades of lessons learned and delivering now what might have been ready next year. MSDOS (or the QDOS predecessor) was meant to run on "cheap" microcomputer hardware and appeal to tinkerers. OpenClaw is supposed to appeal to YOLO / FOMO sentiments. And of course, neither will be able to evolve to their eventual real-world context. But for some time (much longer than intended), that's where it will be.
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
  OpenClaw was an inevitability. An obvious idea that predates LLMs. It took this long for models and pricing to catch up. As much as I dislike this term, if there's one clear example of "Product Model Fit", it's OpenClaw - well, except that arguably what made it truly possible was subscription pricing introduced with Claude Code; before, people were extremely conservative with tokens. But the point is, OpenClaw is just the first that lucked and got viral. If not for it, something equivalent would. Much like LangChain in the early LLM days.
  - marssaxman 6mo ago
    Would you mind explaining what that idea actually is? I don't understand what people are trying to do with this thing, or why they would think that would be a good thing to do, and some of the stories about it sound basically insane, so I must not be grasping the core idea.
    - bravura 6mo ago
      It's a handful of useful features that together feel qualitatively different, like you're talking to a real person.
      - Planktonne 6mo ago
        Such things always feel qualitatively different to the people captured by the craze; it doesn't mean there actually is a difference.
pointlessone 6mo ago
Wow. Much security. I too remember DOS. Data and code finely blended and perfectly mixed in the same universally accessible block of memory. Oh, wait… single context. nwm
teach 6mo ago
This isn't especially related to the article, but when I was at university my first assembler class taught the Motorola 680x0 assembly. I didn't own a computer (most people didn't) but my dorm had a single Mac that you could sign up to use so I did some assignments on that. Problem is, I was just learning and the mac was running System 7. Which, like MS-DOS, lacked memory protection. So, one backwards test at the end of your loop and you could -- quite easily -- just overwrite system memory with whatever bytes you like. I must have hard-locked that computer half a dozen times. Power cycle. Wait for it to slowly reboot off the external 20MB SCSI HDD. Eventually I took to just printing out the code and tracing through it instead of bothering to run it. Once I could get through the code without any obvious mistakes I'd hazard a "real" execution. To this day, automatic memory management still feels a little luxurious.
nryoo 6mo ago
$180/month to control your lights and music. A Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant does this for $0/month and doesn't exfiltrate your home network topology to a third-party API. The value proposition only makes sense if your time is worth more than your privacy.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6mo ago
  This comparison is dishonest, and you know that it is. This is coming from someone that uses Home Assistant and wouldn’t touch OpenClaw with a 10 foot pole. If I had a horse in this race it’d be your horse, but to pretend that these achieve the same goals is just… not in the spirit of an actual discussion.
  - albatrosstrophy 6mo ago
    Kindly elaborate? Coming from someone who still uses AI mainly to draft emails and raspberry Pi as sandboxed automation project.
  - everforward 6mo ago
    I have the voice assistant on Mike hooked up to Claude and it does most of the things I’d want OpenClaw to do. I’m not generally interested in having it read my email or calendar. I have a digital calendar in the kitchen, and I rarely get important email. I do really enjoy being able to control my house by voice in natural language. I had it set all my lights to Easter colors a while back in a single instruction.
  - nickthegreek 6mo ago
    As someone who has openclaw and HA. HA can very much do alot of what I do in OpenClaw but would take more initial work but would be better in the long run.
    - _whiteCaps_ 6mo ago
      Seems like the approach should be to have an LLM set up HA.
Schlagbohrer 6mo ago
Why am I totally unable to understand this post. I have been a long time computer user but this has way too much jargon for me.
- wccrawford 6mo ago
  There's a difference between using a thing and understanding how it works. There's a lot of stuff in this that reference things that only hardware and software creators are going to understand, and only if they're deep enough into their craft. "Interrupts", for example, are an old concept that is rarely talked about anymore until you get into low-level programming. At a high level, you don't even think about them, let alone talk about them.
  - khalic 6mo ago
    cries in rust interrupts
    - wccrawford 6mo ago
      And you don't think those are pretty low-level? If they're doing the same thing as the interrupts that the article is talking about, they are low-level. If they aren't, then the comparison is by name only.
stared 6mo ago
I don’t get this OpenClaw hype. When people vibe-code, usually the goal is to do something. When I hear people using OpenClaw, usually the goal seems to be… using OpenClaw. At a cost of a Mac Mini, safety (deleting emails or so), and security (litelmm attack).
- leonidasrup 6mo ago
  OpenClaw, the ultimate arbitrary code execution
  - classified 6mo ago
    Didn't you always want to let everyone else do remote code execution on your computer?
- thenthenthen 6mo ago
  To me openclaw sounds like a software clickfarm?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
  The main "sales pitch" appears to be "You can have the computer do things for you without having to learn how to use a computer" (at the cost of now having to learn how to use a massively overcomplicated and fundamentally unreliable system; It's just an illusion of ease of use.) The thread's linked article is about comparing MS-DOS' security, but the comparison works on another level as well: I remember MS-DOS. When the very idea of the home/office computer was new. When regular people learned how to use these computers. All this pretension that computers are "hard to use", that LLMs are making the impossible possible, it's all ahistoric nonsense. "It would've taken me months!" no, you would've just had to spend a day or two learning the basics of python.
  - stared 6mo ago
    I was one of those using MS-DOS (still I remember blue Norton Commander). I didn't understand people mocking it later - as it just worked. Enough to run the Prince of Persia, Doom or so. Or edit text files. (As an excuse, I was just ~7 yo back then.)
2muchcoffeeman 6mo ago
[dead]
LudwigNagasena 6mo ago
And I remember OSes today, 1 year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, etc. Security was always a problem. People blindly delegate admin privileges to scripts and programs from the internet all the time. It’s hard to make something secure and usable at the same time. It’s not like agent harnesses suddenly broke all adopted best practices around software and sandboxing. I remember Apple introducing sandboxing for Mac apps, extending deadlines because no one was implementing it. AFAIK, many apps still don’t release apps there simply because of how limiting it is. Ironically, the author suggests to install his software by curl’ing it and piping it straight into sh.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
sriku 6mo ago
"Fast" is not always a virtue and "efficiency" is not always the only consideration.
tomasol 6mo ago
I believe the codegen must be separated from the runtime. Every time you ask AI for a new task, it must be deployed as a separate app with the least amount of privileges possible, potentially with manual approvals as the app is executing. So essentially you need a workflow engine.
- azmz 5mo ago
  [flagged]
saidnooneever 6mo ago
DOS didn't have certain protections because the hardware it targeted did not have those protections. For UNIX on the same machines, they also had no such protections. On 8086 there were no CPU rings, no virtual memory and no other features to help there. Memory isolation is enforced by the MMU. This is not software. Maybe you were confused with Linux, which came later, and landed in a soft x32 bed with CPU rings and Page Tables/VirtualMemory. ("Protected Mode", named for that reason...) That being said, OpenClaw is criminally bad, but as such, fits well in our current AI/LLM ecosystem.
- TacticalCoder 6mo ago
  > DOS didn't have certain protections because the hardware it targeted did not have those protections. For UNIX on the same machines, they also had no such protections. On 8086 there were no CPU rings, no virtual memory and no other features to help there. Those arrived with the 386 (286? Don't remember but 386 for sure) and DOS was well alive late into the 386 and even late in the 486 days. > For UNIX on the same machines, they also had no such protections. I was already running Linux on my 486 before Windows 95 arrived. Linux and DOS. One had those protections, the other didn't.
  - organsnyder 6mo ago
    Windows 95 was still based on DOS, and didn't offer a lot in the way of isolation or other security features. Win98 and ME were similar. It wasn't until all Windows versions used the NT kernel (XP being the first consumer-focused release) that this changed.
  - badc0ffee 6mo ago
    I agree that DOS was offered well past when it should have been, but there were alternatives even in the 1980s - Netware, OS/2, commercial UNIX like XENIX and SCO.
  - pixl97 6mo ago
    I mean, why would Microsoft program said protections into DOS when NT existed by 93? Simply put there was no putting said protections in to DOS for a few reasons. Backwards compatibility being a huge one. That and memory in most computers was tiny, getting Linux running on most of them would have been difficult.
ymolodtsov 6mo ago
I run OpenClaw on a $4 VPS with read-only access to most of the accounts. Just this morning I asked it to confirm how exactly our company is paying for a particular service and whether we ever switched to the vendor directly. In about 30s it found all the necessary emails and provided me with a timeline. It's like your actual asssitant. Now, most of this can be done inside ChatGPT/Claude/Codex now. Their only remaining problem for certain agentic things is being able to run those remotely. You can set up Telegram with Claude Code but it's somehow even more complicated than OpenClaw.
pantulis 6mo ago
This weekend I installed Hermes on my computer. My M4 Max Studio started spinning its fans as if it wanted to fly, so I went for some cloud hosted models. The thing works as advertised, but token consumption is through the roof. of course ymmv depending on the LLM you choose. But my main takeaway is that from the security standpoint this is a ticking bomb. Even under Docker, for these things to be useful there is no going around giving it credentials and permissions that are stored in your computer where they can be accessed by the agent. So, for the time being, I see Telegram, my computer, the LLM router (OpenRouter) and the LLM server as potential attack/exfiltration surfaces. Add to that uncontrolled skills/agents from unknown origins. And to top it off, don't forget that the agent itself can malfunction and, say, remove all your email inboxes by mistake. Fascinating technology but lacking maturity. One can clearly see why OpenAI hired Clawdbot's creator. The company that manages to build an enterprise-ready platform around this wins the game.
- mentalgear 6mo ago
  > One can clearly see why OpenAI hired Clawdbot Hype, mainly buying Hype before their IPO. The project is open source and the thinking behind it is not difficult, if they truly wanted they could have done it a long time ago or even without the guy. It was a pure hype 'acquisition' of a project that become popular for amateur programmers that got into it through vibe-coding and are unaware of the consequences and security exposure they subject themselves at.
  - btbuildem 6mo ago
    They absolutely purchased the hype momentum. It would've been cheaper to copy the project, but it's not about the functionality it provides.
  - bitmasher9 6mo ago
    This is the Siri-brained explanation. The Apple AI assistant has been stagnant for 10 years. Therefore assistants as a whole cannot be good. This is so clearly the next step from Siri to Alexa to {Openclaw like technology}, that is an interface to technology that loads of people find value in everyday, and loads of people complain doesn’t have enough capabilities.
TacticalCoder 6mo ago
> curl-pipe-sh as well. The installer verifies the release signature with ssh-keygen against an embedded key, fail-closed on every failure path. The installer’s own SHA is pinned in the README for readers who want to check the script before piping. Packages shipping as part of Linux distros are signed. Official Emacs packages (but not installed by the default Emacs install) are all signed too. I thankfully see some projects released, outside of distros, that are signed by the author's private key. Some of these keys I have saved (and archived) since years. I've got my own OCI containers automatically verifying signed hashes from known author's past public keys (i.e. I don't necessarily blindly trust a brand new signature key as I trust one I know the author has been using since 10 years). Adding SHA hashes pinning to "curl into bash" is a first step but it's not sufficient. Software shipped properly aren't just pinning hashes into shell scripts that are then served from pwned Vercel sites. Because the attacker can "pin" anything he wants on a pwned JavaScript site. Proper software releases are signed. And they're not "signed" by the 'S' in HTTPS as in "That Vercel-compromised HTTPS site is safe because there's an 'S' in HTTPS". Is it hard to understand that signing a hash (that you can then PIN) with a private key that's on an airgapped computer is harder to hack than an online server? We see major hacks nearly daily know. The cluestick is hammering your head, constantly. When shall the clue eventually hit the curl-basher? Oh wait, I know, I know: "It's not convenient" and "Buuuuut HTTPS is just as safe as a 10 years old private key that has never left an airgapped computer". Here, a fucking cluestick for the leftpad'ers: https://wiki.debian.org/Keysigning https://wiki.debian.org/Keysigning (btw Debian signs the hash of testing release with GPG keys that haven't changed in years and, yes, I do religiously verify them)
tnelsond4 6mo ago
I think we should be giving AI access to something like templeos where there is no permissions and everything runs unrestricted and you can rewrite the os while it's running.
raincole 6mo ago
And MS-DOS was a massive success. Even 'massive' is such an understatement and English probably needs to invent a new word for that level of world-changing business. So yeah, perhaps it isn't fooling the author, but it doesn't matter for the other billions of people.
Havoc 6mo ago
That’s a great deal of technical isolation but does little to address the real problem. If the agent has access to both your info (email, files etc) and reads things on say the open internet then it’s vulnerable to prompt injection and Data exfiltration. And if you remove either access to data or access to internet then you kill a good chunk of usefulness
- amdivia 6mo ago
  Also what people forget, even read access alone can be used to communicate with an attacker. Assume locally i know a read only agent (running on account A) is reading a specific file from user B. Assume it has access to a secret that user B cannot observe. By prompt injection, you can have the read only agent encode the secret as "read" pattern that user B can decode by looking at file access times. (You can think of fetch requests and the likes for more involved cases) So read only, while helpful, does not innately prevent communication with an attacker
the__alchemist 6mo ago
The analogies the author highlights the multi-purpose nature of these machines, which I believe persists to this day, and is why some people have a hard time adopting Linux (Or why UAC was controversial in an older Win version): The conflation of personal computers, and a multi-user IT systems or servers. The IT story of Wal-Mart used to make the analogy is in the latter category. My dad typing up documents for work, or me playing The Lost Mind of Dr Brain and Mario Teaches Typing have different security requirements.
nurettin 6mo ago
It wasn't entirely DOS's fault. DOS was a relic from the end of single-process single-user era. Corporate took that and bent it to their use instead of settling for something more complex and harder required an entire department to maintain. *Claw is more like windows 98. Everyone knows it is broken, nobody really cares. And you are almost certainly going to be cryptolocked (or worse) because of it. It isn't a matter of if, but when.
npodbielski 6mo ago
I does not look like it support streaming of responses from llm into channel. Big issue for local inferrence.
jimmypk 6mo ago
[flagged]
classified 6mo ago
The value proposition seems clear: OpenClaw lets you speedrun the Why of application security and sandboxing from first principles. Start with putting all of your money and your valuables in a box without a lock stored in a public place. If you learn something from that, you may proceed with the next step.
colechristensen 6mo ago
"Blender is damaged and can't be opened." I'm writing a Blender plugin. I don't know what I did to offend MacOS but somewhere I changed something or touched a file and now MacOS refuses to open Blender until I go through an arcane ritual of telling the OS it's actually ok to use. I don't like the lack of control in name of security or that you're having to be come ever-more an expert to actually use things you own. Security needs to be done carefully and intentionally not just blasted everywhere. What is being called security is very much more often control by the creators.
Dwedit 6mo ago
DOS wasn't normally used with a network. No network = far less need for security.
- gus_massa 6mo ago
  But you were sharing floppy disk all time, it was sneakernetted.
  - jandrese 6mo ago
    And boot sector viruses were a plague in the DOS era, especially for computer labs. It only took one person bringing in an infected disk before the whole thing was a vector for Stoned Empire Monkey or something.
- Andrex 6mo ago
  Except networkization was inevitable and I'm sure the smart people in the room saw it coming.
  - GuB-42 6mo ago
    For what I remember, networkization with DOS was a PITA so set up. You didn't have a convenient system API with sockets. You had to mess with interrupts, registers, etc... Your app had to be programmed for your specific hardware, and networking looked more like talking to serial ports than anything else. Remember that DOS is single process, it is not as if you could run a service just like that. You could mess with interrupt handlers, but you had to do the scheduling yourself, and make sure your code is small, because shockingly, 640k may not be enough for everyone. MS-DOS simply wasn't a good choice for networking, and not just because of the lack of security. In fact, it could turn out to be more secure than modern systems because of the limited attack surface. No crazy framework stacks here, just your code and the network card.
- jorgeortiz85 6mo ago
  Good thing OpenClaw never needs to be used with a network. Oh, wait…
eggy 6mo ago
I ran Minix around 1991 on my Amiga computer. Minix had a smaller attack surface and isolation provided by its microkernel vs. Linux's monolithic kernel. I had the Minix textbook, and it was easier to think about it because of the split along modules. I personally think Minix vs. Linux was very similar to Betamax vs. VHS. Betamax was technically superior, but the market picked VHS. I may run Minix again on my old Lenovo T430u from 2012. I was amazed that some of the code to Minix was in the appendix of the book, sort of like the magazines with pages of code to hand type in games or toy programs. I guess I liked MS-DOS for the same reason: tinkering, from my PEEK and POKE back in my Commodore PET 2001 (1977) and Vic-20 days...
- overfeed 6mo ago
  > I may run Minix again on my old Lenovo T430u from 2012. If your old Lenovo has vPro/Intel AMT - then you already are running Minix.
  - BirAdam 6mo ago
    And, you're running Minix on a 486.
  - eggy 5mo ago
    For sure, and that makes MINIX the most widely used consumer OS!
- jjmarr 6mo ago
  Betamax had better picture quality but only had 1 hour of capacity. VHS had 2 hours. Consumers preferred not having to switch tapes to higher picture quality. Convenience is a technical advantage. That's why streaming later beat Blu-ray despite a regression in picture quality.
  - pbhjpbhj 6mo ago
    Surely you'd just make the tape/cassette larger? Remember laserdisc? I remember watching something on Betamax, possibly Star Wars but have no recollection of changing tape. My dad was a teacher and had access to a VT player on my birthday. On other occasions he would bring home a BBC Microcomputer. Quite a treat when we couldn't afford to buy our own TV even. Edit, seems Empire Strikes Back was a single tape - https://ebay.us/m/Ypz8SW https://ebay.us/m/Ypz8SW
souravroyetl 6mo ago
[flagged]
- ronjakoi 6mo ago
  What's wrong with typing 2:1?
  - souravroyetl 6mo ago
    [flagged]
_345 6mo ago
The page is hard to read on landscape browsers like Chrome on Win11.
traderj0e 6mo ago
I'm more interested in the MS-DOS part about this than the OpenClaw part. That thing about reworking OSes from the ground up, it seems like we're overdue for that on the desktop side. Of course people have tried, but each time it was part of making some mobile-desktop Frankenstein UI nobody wanted, not fixing the problem by itself. Using my Mac or Windows PC, it's very rare that I actually want an app to access files on its own that it didn't create. Like if I write a doc in Word, I'm only going to edit it in Word. I might want to email a copy to someone, but that doesn't mean Mail needs RW access to the original. I might copy a video clip into editing software, but again it doesn't need to touch the original. Programs often need their own dirs for caches, settings, etc, and those don't even need to be read by other programs. It's also annoying how they can write anywhere in ~/ and end up scattering stuff in random places. The iPhone sandboxing system works great for all that, where apps have to explicitly share to others. The Mac file access rules tried to address this but still seem like Swiss cheese while also getting in the way of normal usage, and there's seemingly nothing in Windows or Linux (unless you're going out of your way with jails). Other APIs besides file are a bigger challenge. That was gated away from the start on iPhones but not on desktop OSes. If they don't find a solution, web and mobile apps are going to keep taking over.
- kccqzy 6mo ago
  Your worldview aligns very well with what Apple is doing anyways. All you need to do is to use macOS, and only download apps from the Mac App Store (because they are sandboxed). And millions of non-technical Apple users are doing just that. It seems like what you describe is basically already a reality, so why is there a need for a reworking from the ground up?
  - traderj0e 6mo ago
    It's still not like the iPhone sandboxing, it's a bandaid. Many of them genuinely need wide access to function, so just asking for permission doesn't really solve the problem. Like when you open a file in the picker, that's actually granting RW access to the entire dir permanently. On top of fixing the technical side, they need it to feel safe to the user, which right now it doesn't. Separately, idk if anyone is only installing from the Mac App Store. You can't even get Chrome that way. It's also just bad, like it bothers you about login, then apps get stuck in half-downloaded state. But yeah if anyone can pull this off, it'd be Apple, seeing how frequently they'll break apps by requiring new APIs.
kazinator 6mo ago
I Canada there is a character used in IKEA radio ads known as "Swedish Guy", who speaks with a funny accent. I'm reading that Swedish IT consultant's rant in the voice of Swedish Guy.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
GMoromisato 6mo ago
Except MS-DOS ultimately won. I grew up in Boston in the 80s, when giants like DEC and Data General were at the leading edge of computing. I remember mainframe folks complaining that "MS-DOS is so primitive! Here's a nickel, kid, buy yourself a real OS." By the 90s, when I was working on DOS/Windows software, I was inundated with resumes from engineers who had been laid off from those very same companies. And it wasn't until Windows XP in 2000 when most people moved away from DOS. I feel like every twenty years or so, kids look at the current computing landscape and say, "That's too complicated! I'm not going to learn all that--I'm just going to invent my own thing." DOS was that in the 80s, the Web in 2000. Maybe OpenClaw is that for the 2020s. AI is certainly going to reinvent everything. The DEC people were right about DOS: it was barely more than a toy. But we didn't abandon it and go back to the safety of VMS. Instead, we improved it until it had all the security and capabilities we needed. I don't know if OpenClaw is going to win or not, but if you remember MS-DOS, you wouldn't count it out.
d3Xt3r 6mo ago
> The sad days of DOS. Any program could peek and poke the kernel, hook interrupts, write anywhere on disk. Sad? That was the best part of DOS. Some of my fondest computing memories was on DOS - warts and all. Being able to live hexedit your drive and memory to cheat in games, the sheer freedom you got from hacking around the OS is incompatible to modern operating systems - even Linux. You were in full control of your computer and you decided how it could be used, not some mega corporation or compliance agency. DOS wasn't sad, it was fun.
- tehologist 6mo ago
  This was also when most of these machines were not online. Security wasn't as much of a concern.
- Delk 6mo ago
  You could do all of those things on an OS with proper security separation as long as you have full root access. There's no megacorp stopping you from reading and writing kernel memory. Unless, of course, the computer refuses to run software not signed by the megacorp or some software refuses to run without a digitally signed chain all the way down to the firmware like some game anticheats do. But that's not really because of things like permission boundaries for processes. You can have those and still be in full control of those boundaries. It may be more convoluted than in a barebones system like DOS, of course.
  - hun3 5mo ago
    PatchGuard would like to have a word with you.
digimantis 6mo ago
to this day i still dont get why people get so crazy about openclaw. i am not saying it's not good. but it's not worth the hype. i am guessing maybe a lot of people who do not code agents dont even know chatgpt can complete automated tasks?
fuzzfactor 6mo ago
>For the first time, Wal-Mart could store customer info on a disk. Well, that may be the first time it wasn't a mainframe. Plus this is for the lay-away project of the mid-'80's when IBM-compatible PC's already existed. What most people don't realize is that before the IBM PC, Wal-Mart was way ahead of all other retailers with its POS, inventory, and logistics systems from all over the US tied into headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Using telephone modems of course like anybody else, but this is before they had any "superstores", and were still quite small, nor were they in any big cities. Yet. But they were ready. Actually that was all Sam had ever been planning for since the beginning, but they had become quite successful enough already as the fastest growing chain of mainly rural "country stores". A typical Wal-Mart was dwarfed by a K-Mart store, and a full-size Sears seemed like a super store by comparison. They had mainframes and POS too but Wal-Mart just took it to the next level. Ran circles around them digitally. Really did scorch some earth with those kind of advantages when they came to the big cities, but after the PC came out I would say they regressed more toward the mean. The momentum still overwhelmed though.
sixhobbits 6mo ago
Seems like pro-openclaw arguments dressed up as anti ones. Author remembers MS DOS for a reason. I have similar concerns and somehow think openclaw will not be remembered in 30 years time so the comparison does not land for me
hun3 5mo ago
Ironic, since Unix is itself an embodiment of "worse is better."

307 points by feigewalnuss 6mo ago

[dead]

piker 6mo ago

Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks? I just personally have zero interest in letting an AI into my comms and see no value there whatsoever. Probably negative.

_pdp_ 6mo ago
There is value but it is hard to discover and extract outside of a few known areas - like coding, etc.
- piker 6mo ago
  Yes, I can see the (potential) value in working with agents in software development. The “claw” movement I understood to suggest value in less constrained access to my inbox, personal messages, calendar etc like some sort of PA. It’s hard to quantify how much damage a bad PA can do to someone’s personal and professional life, so if my understand is correct, this seems like a dead end.
  - _pdp_ 6mo ago
    I posted this comment in another thread so reposting it here because it seems to be on topic. --- IMHO, the biggest problem with OpenClaw and other AI agents is that the use-cases are still being discovered. We have deployed several hundred of these to customers and I think this challenge comes from the fact that AI agents are largely perceived as workflow automation tools so when it comes to business process they are seen as a replacement for more established frameworks. They can automate but they are not reliable. I think of them as work and process augmentation tools but this is not how most customers think in my experience. However, here are a several legit use-case that we use internally which I can freely discuss. There is an experimental single-server dev infrastructure we are working on that is slightly flaky. We deployed a lightweight agent in go (single 6MB binary) that connects to our customer-facing API (we have our own agentic platform) where the real agent is sitting and can be reconfigured. The agent monitors the server for various health issues. These could be anything from stalled VMs, unexpected errors etc. It is firecracker VMs that we use in very particular way and we don't know yet the scope of the system. When such situations are detected the agent automatically corrects the problems. It keeps of log what it did in a reusable space (resource type that we have) under a folder called learnings. We use these files to correct the core issues when we have the type to work on the code. We have an AI agent called Studio Bot. It exists in Slack. It wakes up multiple times during the day. It analyses our current marketing efforts and if it finds something useful, it creates the graphics and posts to be sent out to several of our social media channels. A member of staff reviews these suggestions. Most of the time they need to follow up with subsequent request to change things and finally push the changes to buffer. I also use the agent to generate branded cover images for linkedin, x and reddit articles in various aspect ratios. It is a very useful tool that produces graphics with our brand colours and aesthetics but it is not perfect. We have a customer support agent that monitors how well we handle support request in zendesk. It does not automatically engage with customers. What it does is to supervise the backlog of support tickets and chase the team when we fall behind, which happens. We have quite a few more scattered in various places. Some of them are even public. In my mind, the trick is to think of AI agents as augmentation tools. In other words, instead of asking how can I take myself out of the equation, the better question is how can I improve the situation. Sometimes just providing more contextually relevant information is more than enough. Sometimes, you need a simple helper that own a certain part of the business. I hope this helps.
    - bsenftner 6mo ago
      Great information post. don't let the AI fad boi's down votes lead you to think this is not a very worthwhile contribution.
    - esseph 6mo ago
      > They can automate but they are not reliable. This is why I won't use them for anything externally facing or with high or even moderate damage potential. Which basically means they don't get used at all.
      - _pdp_ 6mo ago
        This is my point ... it is a change of perspective. They are best suited for cooperation for now.
    - eucyclos 6mo ago
      Weird that you're being downvoted for sharing anecdata on actual use cases. It's as if there's a desire to downplay the positive aspects of this technology in the HN community.
TheDong 6mo ago
I find some value as kinda a better alexa. I have it hooked up to my smart home stuff, like my speaker and smart lights and TV, and I've given it various skills to talk to those things. I can message it "Play my X playlist" or "Give me the gorillaz song I was listening to yesterday" I can also message it "Download Titanic to my jellyfin server and queue it up", and it'll go straight to the pirate bay. It having a browser and the ability to run cli tools, and also understand English well enough to know that "Give me some Beatles" means to use its audio skill, means it's a vastly better alexa It only costs me like $180 a month in API credits (now that they banned using the max plan), so seems okay still.
- coldtea 6mo ago
  Regarding Alexa, none of those use cases sound that useful to have an ever-present listening device at home, except if one is bedbound or something.
- puelocesar 6mo ago
  180 grand a month for PA is a lot of money. But I guess each person has its own priority. I mean, I can pay a very fancy gym with that price instead of the shitty popular one I go, which would probably improve my well being much more than asking to play Gorillaz
  - quietbritishjim 6mo ago
    "a grand" means a thousand (dollars or pounds or whatever). $180k / month really would be a lot of money. I'd be your PA for that!
    - puelocesar 6mo ago
      ok, now I wish there was an edit button. Thanks for noticing the mistake though
- tikotus 6mo ago
  I don't want to be judgemental, but I do find it funny that you're paying $180 for this convenience, and use it to pirate movies.
onchainintel 6mo ago
It all depends on what you do aka your use case. If you're in the content creatio business, which is part of my responsibilities, then yes has been massively helpful. For other roles, I can absolutely see no use case or benefit. Context matters, like with everything.
iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
Eh, buddy says he uses them for his network and, apparently, some light IT maintenance for his family members. So far it seems to be working for him. I am not that brave.
mathgladiator 6mo ago
Agent environments like OpenClaw are in the toy phase, and OpenClaw is teaching people how to build things with agents in a toy-like and unreliable way. I used my understanding of OpenClaw to build scalable + secure + auditable agent infrastructure in my platform such that I can build products that other people can use.
- bayindirh 6mo ago
  We had better agent infrastructures (namely JADE) back in the day. I worked with them, and now these things look like flimsy 50¢ plastic toys to me, too.
ZeroGravitas 6mo ago
I see the appeal, but I also see the risks. If you ignore the risks I don't see why it's hard to see value. The AI can read all your email, that's useful. It can delete them to free up space after deciding they are useless. It can push to GitHub. The more of your private info and passwords you give it the more useful it becomes. That's all great, until it isn't. Putting firewalls in place is probably possible and obviously desirable but is a bit of a hassle and will probably reduce the usefulness to some degree, so people won't. We'll all collectively touch the stove and find out that it is hot.
- theshrike79 6mo ago
  Just limit the tooling. There's no reason for the AI to be able to delete emails for example. I built a fastmail CLI tool for my *claw and it can only read mails, that's it. I might give it the ability to archive and label later on, with a separate log of actions so I can undo any operation it did easily. It's pretty decent at going "hey, there's a sale on $thing at $store", for mails, but that's about it.
- greedo 6mo ago
  Deleting email to free up space has to be the most ridiculous justification for burning up the environment.
vbezhenar 6mo ago
Many wealthy people use human assistants to offload mundane work. This is cheap replacement for ordinary people. It's going to be big. But probably it's best to wait for Google and Apple to step up their assistants.
- lionkor 6mo ago
  Those human assistants can be held accountable.
  - sekh60 6mo ago
    I deleted your calendar, I'm sorry.
    - lionkor 6mo ago
      But you BET that person is never, ever making that mistake again!
- piker 6mo ago
  Yes, and that's because the workflow of those people generally requires managing a crazy, dynamic schedule including travel, meetings, comms, etc. Those folks need real humans with long-term memories and incentives to establish trust for managing these high-stakes engagements. Their human assistants might find these things useful, but there's zero chance Bill Gates is having an AI schedule his travel plans or draft his text messages. OTOH, this isn't an issue for "ordinary people". They go to work, school, children's sports events, etc. If they had an assistant for free, most of them would probably find it difficult to generate enough volume to establish the muscle memory of using them. In my own professional life, this occurred with junior lawyers and legal assistants--the juniors just never found them useful because they didn't need them even though they were available. Even the partners ended up consolidating around sharing a few of them for the same reason. Down in this thread someone mentions it being an advanced Alexa, which seems apt. Yes, a party novelty but not useful enough to be top of mind in the every day work flow.
  - 6mo ago
dankobgd 6mo ago
no, it's only for scammers
pjmlp 6mo ago
Same here, I care to the extent I am obligated to, and staying relevant for finding a job.
rimliu 6mo ago
I am also surprised by the number of people willing to outsource their lives.
- eucyclos 6mo ago
  Just the boring bits. I don't need openclaw to lounge by a pool thinking about macro trends for me.
andai 6mo ago
It's pretty much just Claude Code, except hooked up to your Telegram / WhatsApp / iMessage. I don't know why they don't make an official integration for it. Probably cause they're already out of GPUs lol
- edschofield 6mo ago
  Claude Code does now have integration with Telegram, Discord, and iMessage as of a few weeks ago: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels https://code.claude.com/docs/en/channels I haven't used OpenClaw since then ...
jstummbillig 6mo ago
> letting an AI into my comms Idk, it's strange for me to think of it that way. It's tech. If it does something useful, that's cool. Data protection is always a consideration. I just don't consider a LLM to be a special case or a person, the same way that I don't have strong feelings about "AI" being applied in google search since forever. I don't have special feelings or get embarrassed by the thought of a LLM touching my mails. Right now for me, agentic coding is great. I have a hard time seeing a future where the benefits that we experience there will not be more broadly shared. Explorations in that direction is how we get there.
- rowanG077 6mo ago
  The problem for me is not the LLM reading it. The problem is the company behind it can most likely recover the sessions. That is a problem since they could share it with whomever they want. Even if they are fully incorruptable it's also not uncommon that they simply get hacked and all this data ends up on the open market.
- piker 6mo ago
  My issues aren’t really with privacy so much as what the failure modes look like, and, more fundamentally, with becoming a passenger to my own life.
littlecranky67 6mo ago
I can see a value in a smarter email-inbox sorting algorithm - but only because all major players (except google which I don't trust with my mails) have abandoned bayesian email filtering with training. This was standard in 2005 in such basic clients such as the Opera browser, but somehow we lost this technology along the way.
- Terr_ 6mo ago
  I can't recall the name, but I vaguely remember a Bayesian spam filter for arbitrary POP3 accounts in the 2000s that had a local web frontend, and how excited I was at its effectiveness. I believe that the shift from "my one computer" to multiple clients (computer + phone + webmail) probably has something to do with it. Even with IMAP sharing state, you still don't have a great way to see and control the filtering, except by moving things in/out of spam folders.
- easygenes 6mo ago
  I was an original Thunderbird pre-1.0 (from 2003) user and prior to that, Netscape Mail, and am quite certain it has had bayesian spam filtering all this time, at least since the late ‘90s. That was a headline feature in the early days. My first email account used POP3 through a shared web host for my own domain in that era. Edit: Yes it’s still there https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-sp...
pizza234 6mo ago
> Is anyone finding value in these things other than VCs and thought leaders looking for clicks and “picks and shovels” folks? Mostly (but of course, not exclusively), porn for the techies. Receiving a phone notification every time a PR is opened on a project of yours? Exciting or sad, depends on one's outlook on life.
- moffkalast 6mo ago
  I thought emails from github already did that?
  - mgkimsal 6mo ago
    I think the more useful part is the parts that checks a ticket, fixes a bug, then opens the PR automatically. Whether you get an email or a phone text or call from a voice agent is ... somewhat secondary, im.
    - moffkalast 6mo ago
      Fixes a bug, yeah that's some wishful thinking right there. I don't think it counts if it adds three new ones in the process.
      - eucyclos 6mo ago
        If it added four last month I'd say it absolutely counts. Trends often matter more than position.
surgical_fire 6mo ago
No. But I am someone that, for example, dislikes home automation. Know that thing that you ask Alexa to open your curtains? I think that is cringe af. Maybe there's an overlap with the crowd that likes that.
stingraycharles 6mo ago
This is being asked on pretty much every Openclaw thread, and the use cases brought up seem roughly similar: digital assistant. It of course depends heavily on your work, but my work is 50% communication / overseeing, and I simply lose track of everything. I don’t give it any credentials of any sort, but I run data pipelines on an hourly basis that ingest into the agent’s workspace.
cl0ckt0wer 6mo ago
Mostly it's fun. It'll so some light infra management for me too.
coldtea 6mo ago
Newb technies love it.
mark_l_watson 6mo ago
I ran OpenClaw in a container, on a VPS without connection to messaging systems, so perhaps that is why I didn't get value. Similarly, I have been using Hermes Agent also inside a container, and on a VPS with only access to a local directory in the VPS with a dozen active projects on GitHub. I don't give it access to my GitHub credentials, but allow it to work in whatever branch is checked out. This setup is fabulously productive. I use it about every other day to perform some meaningful task for me. It is inexpensive also. A task might take 20 minutes and cost $0.25 in GLP-5.1 API costs. So TLDR: out of the box, I use Hermes at least one hour a week and find it to be a wonderful tool.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
bitmasher9 6mo ago
Yep, I’m seeing real value. I use them for tasks that an assistant might have done in the past. It’s much cheaper than hiring a human, and setup is much faster than finding a good assistant. I’m honestly considering giving it access to accounts with payment information so it can book flights and hotels for me. You can ask it questions like “what classes does my gym offer between 6-8pm today” and just get a good answer instead of wasting time finding their schedule. You can tell it to check your favorite band’s website everyday to see if they announce any shows in your city. You can tell it to read your emails and automatically add important information to your calendar. This isn’t the space where I get the most value from AI, but it’s nice to have a hyper connected agent that can quickly take care of more smaller and more personal tasks.
- piker 6mo ago
  No offense but all of those are near zero value except entertainment to the orchestrator. That’s without understanding the failure rate and modes. It’s telling that you haven’t yet given it your credit card.
  - bitmasher9 6mo ago
    I would agree that the value is low. It’s the type of thing I wouldn’t pay $20/hr to have a human do, if you want to put a value cap on this type of activity.
jillesvangurp 6mo ago
I talk to a lot of business people that are interested in automating very basic things in their inbox, on their Google drive, in CRMs, etc. The reason is not that they want to be cool and hip but because they are forced to spend lots of their precious time doing very dull and repetitive things. Promising to take some of that pain away is a really easy sell. Hence all the hype around OpenClaw. If you look around in the business world, there is an absurdly large number of people still doing all sorts of things manually that they probably shouldn't. And its costing them money. Even before AI that was true. But now it's increasingly becoming obvious to these people that there are solutions out there that might work. There's a fair amount of FOMO on that front with more clued in people that have heard of other people allegedly being a bit smarter than them. From a practical experience point of view, most people probably don't have the hands-on experience to make a good judgment just yet. "I tried Chat GPT once and it hallucinated" doesn't really count as valid experience at this point and many non-technical people are still at that level. There generally are a lot of headless chickens making absurd claims (either way) about what these systems can and cannot do making sweeping statements about how possible or impossible things are. If you take the time and sit down to automate a few things you'll find that: 1) the tools aren't great right now 2) there are lots of basic plumbing issues that get in the way 3) fixing those plumbing issues is not rocket science and something anyone with basic CLI or scripting skills can solve easily 4) you can actually outsource most of that stuff to coding agents. 5) if you figure some of the basics out, you can actually make OpenClaw or similar systems do things that are valuable. 6) Most people that aren't programmers won't get very far given the current state of tools. 7) this might change rapidly as better tools become available. 8) people generally lack the imagination to see how even basic solutions could work for them with these systems. I have an OpenClaw up and running for our company. It is doing some basic things that are useful for us. After solving some basic plumbing issues, it's now a lot easier to make it do new things. It's not quite doing everything just yet (lots more plumbing issues to solve) and we have our healthy hesitations about letting it loose on our inboxes. But it's not useless or without value. Every plumbing issue we solve unlocks a few more use cases. There's a bit of a gold rush right now of course. And "picks and shovels" people like myself are probably going to do a brisk business. You can wait it out or tap into the action now. That's your choice. But try making it an informed choice. And no better experience than the first-hand type.
seniorThrowaway 6mo ago
Yes, they are good at being coding "interns". They work together in slack which allows management visibility and tasking directly to them. i.e. people who aren't going to be managing a bunch of claude code's all day. I say interns because they are incredibly smart at some things like implementing well defined coding plans and incredibly dumb in other ways, like shipping non-compiling code and asking a human to troubleshoot. To do this requires thoughtful setup, you have to onboard them more like you would a human than a piece of software. Give them their own "workstation", accounts etc. Limit what they can do in those accounts, not in their .md files or skills or anything, they will never follow those 100%, just like a person won't follow directions 100% of the time.

trilogic 6mo ago

Great article. Been skeptical of it since the beginning with this Python "Cli" agents. Been looking for local ai driven Agentic GUI that offers real privacy but coulnt find it anywhere. Finally what we call real local and ClI agents pipeline local ai driven with llama.cpp engine is done. Just pure bash and c++, model isolated, no http, no python, no api, no proprietary models. There is the native version (in c++) and the community version in Electron. Is electron Good enough to protect users Wrapping all the rest? This is exciting.

nopurpose 6mo ago

I agree that sandboxing whole agent is inadequate: I am fine sharing my github creds with the gh CLI, but not with the npm. More granular sunboxing and permission is what I'd like to see and this project seems interesting enough to have a closer look. I am not interested in the "claw" workflow, but if I can use it for a safer "code" environment it is a win for me.

mkesper 6mo ago
When the agent uses your GH credentials to nuke all your projects or put out a lot of crap, this separation will not save you.
- nopurpose 6mo ago
  whitelisting `gh` args should solve it. Event opencode's primitive permission system allows that.
  - tredre3 6mo ago
    The ability to whitelist specific args for commands has been the source of several (countless?) sudo CVEs over the years.

electroglyph 6mo ago

https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/ https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/

falense 6mo ago

Very cool project! I am working on something similar myself. I call mine TriOnyx. Its based on Simon Willison's lethal trifecta. You get a star from me :D https://www.tri-onyx.com/ https://www.tri-onyx.com/

repelsteeltje 6mo ago

One could argue that the discussion is once again about tech debt. Both OpenClaw and MSDOS gaining a lot a traction by taking short cuts, ignoring decades of lessons learned and delivering now what might have been ready next year. MSDOS (or the QDOS predecessor) was meant to run on "cheap" microcomputer hardware and appeal to tinkerers. OpenClaw is supposed to appeal to YOLO / FOMO sentiments. And of course, neither will be able to evolve to their eventual real-world context. But for some time (much longer than intended), that's where it will be.

TeMPOraL 6mo ago
OpenClaw was an inevitability. An obvious idea that predates LLMs. It took this long for models and pricing to catch up. As much as I dislike this term, if there's one clear example of "Product Model Fit", it's OpenClaw - well, except that arguably what made it truly possible was subscription pricing introduced with Claude Code; before, people were extremely conservative with tokens. But the point is, OpenClaw is just the first that lucked and got viral. If not for it, something equivalent would. Much like LangChain in the early LLM days.
- marssaxman 6mo ago
  Would you mind explaining what that idea actually is? I don't understand what people are trying to do with this thing, or why they would think that would be a good thing to do, and some of the stories about it sound basically insane, so I must not be grasping the core idea.
  - bravura 6mo ago
    It's a handful of useful features that together feel qualitatively different, like you're talking to a real person.
    - Planktonne 6mo ago
      Such things always feel qualitatively different to the people captured by the craze; it doesn't mean there actually is a difference.

pointlessone 6mo ago

Wow. Much security. I too remember DOS. Data and code finely blended and perfectly mixed in the same universally accessible block of memory. Oh, wait… single context. nwm

teach 6mo ago

This isn't especially related to the article, but when I was at university my first assembler class taught the Motorola 680x0 assembly. I didn't own a computer (most people didn't) but my dorm had a single Mac that you could sign up to use so I did some assignments on that. Problem is, I was just learning and the mac was running System 7. Which, like MS-DOS, lacked memory protection. So, one backwards test at the end of your loop and you could -- quite easily -- just overwrite system memory with whatever bytes you like. I must have hard-locked that computer half a dozen times. Power cycle. Wait for it to slowly reboot off the external 20MB SCSI HDD. Eventually I took to just printing out the code and tracing through it instead of bothering to run it. Once I could get through the code without any obvious mistakes I'd hazard a "real" execution. To this day, automatic memory management still feels a little luxurious.

nryoo 6mo ago

$180/month to control your lights and music. A Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant does this for $0/month and doesn't exfiltrate your home network topology to a third-party API. The value proposition only makes sense if your time is worth more than your privacy.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6mo ago
This comparison is dishonest, and you know that it is. This is coming from someone that uses Home Assistant and wouldn’t touch OpenClaw with a 10 foot pole. If I had a horse in this race it’d be your horse, but to pretend that these achieve the same goals is just… not in the spirit of an actual discussion.
- albatrosstrophy 6mo ago
  Kindly elaborate? Coming from someone who still uses AI mainly to draft emails and raspberry Pi as sandboxed automation project.
- everforward 6mo ago
  I have the voice assistant on Mike hooked up to Claude and it does most of the things I’d want OpenClaw to do. I’m not generally interested in having it read my email or calendar. I have a digital calendar in the kitchen, and I rarely get important email. I do really enjoy being able to control my house by voice in natural language. I had it set all my lights to Easter colors a while back in a single instruction.
- nickthegreek 6mo ago
  As someone who has openclaw and HA. HA can very much do alot of what I do in OpenClaw but would take more initial work but would be better in the long run.
  - _whiteCaps_ 6mo ago
    Seems like the approach should be to have an LLM set up HA.

Schlagbohrer 6mo ago

Why am I totally unable to understand this post. I have been a long time computer user but this has way too much jargon for me.

wccrawford 6mo ago
There's a difference between using a thing and understanding how it works. There's a lot of stuff in this that reference things that only hardware and software creators are going to understand, and only if they're deep enough into their craft. "Interrupts", for example, are an old concept that is rarely talked about anymore until you get into low-level programming. At a high level, you don't even think about them, let alone talk about them.
- khalic 6mo ago
  cries in rust interrupts
  - wccrawford 6mo ago
    And you don't think those are pretty low-level? If they're doing the same thing as the interrupts that the article is talking about, they are low-level. If they aren't, then the comparison is by name only.

stared 6mo ago

I don’t get this OpenClaw hype. When people vibe-code, usually the goal is to do something. When I hear people using OpenClaw, usually the goal seems to be… using OpenClaw. At a cost of a Mac Mini, safety (deleting emails or so), and security (litelmm attack).

leonidasrup 6mo ago
OpenClaw, the ultimate arbitrary code execution
- classified 6mo ago
  Didn't you always want to let everyone else do remote code execution on your computer?
thenthenthen 6mo ago
To me openclaw sounds like a software clickfarm?
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
SlinkyOnStairs 6mo ago
The main "sales pitch" appears to be "You can have the computer do things for you without having to learn how to use a computer" (at the cost of now having to learn how to use a massively overcomplicated and fundamentally unreliable system; It's just an illusion of ease of use.) The thread's linked article is about comparing MS-DOS' security, but the comparison works on another level as well: I remember MS-DOS. When the very idea of the home/office computer was new. When regular people learned how to use these computers. All this pretension that computers are "hard to use", that LLMs are making the impossible possible, it's all ahistoric nonsense. "It would've taken me months!" no, you would've just had to spend a day or two learning the basics of python.
- stared 6mo ago
  I was one of those using MS-DOS (still I remember blue Norton Commander). I didn't understand people mocking it later - as it just worked. Enough to run the Prince of Persia, Doom or so. Or edit text files. (As an excuse, I was just ~7 yo back then.)

2muchcoffeeman 6mo ago

[dead]

LudwigNagasena 6mo ago

And I remember OSes today, 1 year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, etc. Security was always a problem. People blindly delegate admin privileges to scripts and programs from the internet all the time. It’s hard to make something secure and usable at the same time. It’s not like agent harnesses suddenly broke all adopted best practices around software and sandboxing. I remember Apple introducing sandboxing for Mac apps, extending deadlines because no one was implementing it. AFAIK, many apps still don’t release apps there simply because of how limiting it is. Ironically, the author suggests to install his software by curl’ing it and piping it straight into sh.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

sriku 6mo ago

"Fast" is not always a virtue and "efficiency" is not always the only consideration.

tomasol 6mo ago

I believe the codegen must be separated from the runtime. Every time you ask AI for a new task, it must be deployed as a separate app with the least amount of privileges possible, potentially with manual approvals as the app is executing. So essentially you need a workflow engine.

azmz 5mo ago
[flagged]

saidnooneever 6mo ago

DOS didn't have certain protections because the hardware it targeted did not have those protections. For UNIX on the same machines, they also had no such protections. On 8086 there were no CPU rings, no virtual memory and no other features to help there. Memory isolation is enforced by the MMU. This is not software. Maybe you were confused with Linux, which came later, and landed in a soft x32 bed with CPU rings and Page Tables/VirtualMemory. ("Protected Mode", named for that reason...) That being said, OpenClaw is criminally bad, but as such, fits well in our current AI/LLM ecosystem.

TacticalCoder 6mo ago
> DOS didn't have certain protections because the hardware it targeted did not have those protections. For UNIX on the same machines, they also had no such protections. On 8086 there were no CPU rings, no virtual memory and no other features to help there. Those arrived with the 386 (286? Don't remember but 386 for sure) and DOS was well alive late into the 386 and even late in the 486 days. > For UNIX on the same machines, they also had no such protections. I was already running Linux on my 486 before Windows 95 arrived. Linux and DOS. One had those protections, the other didn't.
- organsnyder 6mo ago
  Windows 95 was still based on DOS, and didn't offer a lot in the way of isolation or other security features. Win98 and ME were similar. It wasn't until all Windows versions used the NT kernel (XP being the first consumer-focused release) that this changed.
- badc0ffee 6mo ago
  I agree that DOS was offered well past when it should have been, but there were alternatives even in the 1980s - Netware, OS/2, commercial UNIX like XENIX and SCO.
- pixl97 6mo ago
  I mean, why would Microsoft program said protections into DOS when NT existed by 93? Simply put there was no putting said protections in to DOS for a few reasons. Backwards compatibility being a huge one. That and memory in most computers was tiny, getting Linux running on most of them would have been difficult.

ymolodtsov 6mo ago

I run OpenClaw on a $4 VPS with read-only access to most of the accounts. Just this morning I asked it to confirm how exactly our company is paying for a particular service and whether we ever switched to the vendor directly. In about 30s it found all the necessary emails and provided me with a timeline. It's like your actual asssitant. Now, most of this can be done inside ChatGPT/Claude/Codex now. Their only remaining problem for certain agentic things is being able to run those remotely. You can set up Telegram with Claude Code but it's somehow even more complicated than OpenClaw.

pantulis 6mo ago

This weekend I installed Hermes on my computer. My M4 Max Studio started spinning its fans as if it wanted to fly, so I went for some cloud hosted models. The thing works as advertised, but token consumption is through the roof. of course ymmv depending on the LLM you choose. But my main takeaway is that from the security standpoint this is a ticking bomb. Even under Docker, for these things to be useful there is no going around giving it credentials and permissions that are stored in your computer where they can be accessed by the agent. So, for the time being, I see Telegram, my computer, the LLM router (OpenRouter) and the LLM server as potential attack/exfiltration surfaces. Add to that uncontrolled skills/agents from unknown origins. And to top it off, don't forget that the agent itself can malfunction and, say, remove all your email inboxes by mistake. Fascinating technology but lacking maturity. One can clearly see why OpenAI hired Clawdbot's creator. The company that manages to build an enterprise-ready platform around this wins the game.

mentalgear 6mo ago
> One can clearly see why OpenAI hired Clawdbot Hype, mainly buying Hype before their IPO. The project is open source and the thinking behind it is not difficult, if they truly wanted they could have done it a long time ago or even without the guy. It was a pure hype 'acquisition' of a project that become popular for amateur programmers that got into it through vibe-coding and are unaware of the consequences and security exposure they subject themselves at.
- btbuildem 6mo ago
  They absolutely purchased the hype momentum. It would've been cheaper to copy the project, but it's not about the functionality it provides.
- bitmasher9 6mo ago
  This is the Siri-brained explanation. The Apple AI assistant has been stagnant for 10 years. Therefore assistants as a whole cannot be good. This is so clearly the next step from Siri to Alexa to {Openclaw like technology}, that is an interface to technology that loads of people find value in everyday, and loads of people complain doesn’t have enough capabilities.

TacticalCoder 6mo ago

> curl-pipe-sh as well. The installer verifies the release signature with ssh-keygen against an embedded key, fail-closed on every failure path. The installer’s own SHA is pinned in the README for readers who want to check the script before piping. Packages shipping as part of Linux distros are signed. Official Emacs packages (but not installed by the default Emacs install) are all signed too. I thankfully see some projects released, outside of distros, that are signed by the author's private key. Some of these keys I have saved (and archived) since years. I've got my own OCI containers automatically verifying signed hashes from known author's past public keys (i.e. I don't necessarily blindly trust a brand new signature key as I trust one I know the author has been using since 10 years). Adding SHA hashes pinning to "curl into bash" is a first step but it's not sufficient. Software shipped properly aren't just pinning hashes into shell scripts that are then served from pwned Vercel sites. Because the attacker can "pin" anything he wants on a pwned JavaScript site. Proper software releases are signed. And they're not "signed" by the 'S' in HTTPS as in "That Vercel-compromised HTTPS site is safe because there's an 'S' in HTTPS". Is it hard to understand that signing a hash (that you can then PIN) with a private key that's on an airgapped computer is harder to hack than an online server? We see major hacks nearly daily know. The cluestick is hammering your head, constantly. When shall the clue eventually hit the curl-basher? Oh wait, I know, I know: "It's not convenient" and "Buuuuut HTTPS is just as safe as a 10 years old private key that has never left an airgapped computer". Here, a fucking cluestick for the leftpad'ers: https://wiki.debian.org/Keysigning https://wiki.debian.org/Keysigning (btw Debian signs the hash of testing release with GPG keys that haven't changed in years and, yes, I do religiously verify them)

tnelsond4 6mo ago

I think we should be giving AI access to something like templeos where there is no permissions and everything runs unrestricted and you can rewrite the os while it's running.

raincole 6mo ago

And MS-DOS was a massive success. Even 'massive' is such an understatement and English probably needs to invent a new word for that level of world-changing business. So yeah, perhaps it isn't fooling the author, but it doesn't matter for the other billions of people.

Havoc 6mo ago

That’s a great deal of technical isolation but does little to address the real problem. If the agent has access to both your info (email, files etc) and reads things on say the open internet then it’s vulnerable to prompt injection and Data exfiltration. And if you remove either access to data or access to internet then you kill a good chunk of usefulness

amdivia 6mo ago
Also what people forget, even read access alone can be used to communicate with an attacker. Assume locally i know a read only agent (running on account A) is reading a specific file from user B. Assume it has access to a secret that user B cannot observe. By prompt injection, you can have the read only agent encode the secret as "read" pattern that user B can decode by looking at file access times. (You can think of fetch requests and the likes for more involved cases) So read only, while helpful, does not innately prevent communication with an attacker

the__alchemist 6mo ago

The analogies the author highlights the multi-purpose nature of these machines, which I believe persists to this day, and is why some people have a hard time adopting Linux (Or why UAC was controversial in an older Win version): The conflation of personal computers, and a multi-user IT systems or servers. The IT story of Wal-Mart used to make the analogy is in the latter category. My dad typing up documents for work, or me playing The Lost Mind of Dr Brain and Mario Teaches Typing have different security requirements.

nurettin 6mo ago

It wasn't entirely DOS's fault. DOS was a relic from the end of single-process single-user era. Corporate took that and bent it to their use instead of settling for something more complex and harder required an entire department to maintain. *Claw is more like windows 98. Everyone knows it is broken, nobody really cares. And you are almost certainly going to be cryptolocked (or worse) because of it. It isn't a matter of if, but when.

npodbielski 6mo ago

I does not look like it support streaming of responses from llm into channel. Big issue for local inferrence.

jimmypk 6mo ago

[flagged]

classified 6mo ago

The value proposition seems clear: OpenClaw lets you speedrun the Why of application security and sandboxing from first principles. Start with putting all of your money and your valuables in a box without a lock stored in a public place. If you learn something from that, you may proceed with the next step.

colechristensen 6mo ago

"Blender is damaged and can't be opened." I'm writing a Blender plugin. I don't know what I did to offend MacOS but somewhere I changed something or touched a file and now MacOS refuses to open Blender until I go through an arcane ritual of telling the OS it's actually ok to use. I don't like the lack of control in name of security or that you're having to be come ever-more an expert to actually use things you own. Security needs to be done carefully and intentionally not just blasted everywhere. What is being called security is very much more often control by the creators.

Dwedit 6mo ago

DOS wasn't normally used with a network. No network = far less need for security.

gus_massa 6mo ago
But you were sharing floppy disk all time, it was sneakernetted.
- jandrese 6mo ago
  And boot sector viruses were a plague in the DOS era, especially for computer labs. It only took one person bringing in an infected disk before the whole thing was a vector for Stoned Empire Monkey or something.
Andrex 6mo ago
Except networkization was inevitable and I'm sure the smart people in the room saw it coming.
- GuB-42 6mo ago
  For what I remember, networkization with DOS was a PITA so set up. You didn't have a convenient system API with sockets. You had to mess with interrupts, registers, etc... Your app had to be programmed for your specific hardware, and networking looked more like talking to serial ports than anything else. Remember that DOS is single process, it is not as if you could run a service just like that. You could mess with interrupt handlers, but you had to do the scheduling yourself, and make sure your code is small, because shockingly, 640k may not be enough for everyone. MS-DOS simply wasn't a good choice for networking, and not just because of the lack of security. In fact, it could turn out to be more secure than modern systems because of the limited attack surface. No crazy framework stacks here, just your code and the network card.
jorgeortiz85 6mo ago
Good thing OpenClaw never needs to be used with a network. Oh, wait…

eggy 6mo ago

I ran Minix around 1991 on my Amiga computer. Minix had a smaller attack surface and isolation provided by its microkernel vs. Linux's monolithic kernel. I had the Minix textbook, and it was easier to think about it because of the split along modules. I personally think Minix vs. Linux was very similar to Betamax vs. VHS. Betamax was technically superior, but the market picked VHS. I may run Minix again on my old Lenovo T430u from 2012. I was amazed that some of the code to Minix was in the appendix of the book, sort of like the magazines with pages of code to hand type in games or toy programs. I guess I liked MS-DOS for the same reason: tinkering, from my PEEK and POKE back in my Commodore PET 2001 (1977) and Vic-20 days...

overfeed 6mo ago
> I may run Minix again on my old Lenovo T430u from 2012. If your old Lenovo has vPro/Intel AMT - then you already are running Minix.
- BirAdam 6mo ago
  And, you're running Minix on a 486.
- eggy 5mo ago
  For sure, and that makes MINIX the most widely used consumer OS!
jjmarr 6mo ago
Betamax had better picture quality but only had 1 hour of capacity. VHS had 2 hours. Consumers preferred not having to switch tapes to higher picture quality. Convenience is a technical advantage. That's why streaming later beat Blu-ray despite a regression in picture quality.
- pbhjpbhj 6mo ago
  Surely you'd just make the tape/cassette larger? Remember laserdisc? I remember watching something on Betamax, possibly Star Wars but have no recollection of changing tape. My dad was a teacher and had access to a VT player on my birthday. On other occasions he would bring home a BBC Microcomputer. Quite a treat when we couldn't afford to buy our own TV even. Edit, seems Empire Strikes Back was a single tape - https://ebay.us/m/Ypz8SW https://ebay.us/m/Ypz8SW

souravroyetl 6mo ago

[flagged]

ronjakoi 6mo ago
What's wrong with typing 2:1?
- souravroyetl 6mo ago
  [flagged]

_345 6mo ago

The page is hard to read on landscape browsers like Chrome on Win11.

traderj0e 6mo ago

I'm more interested in the MS-DOS part about this than the OpenClaw part. That thing about reworking OSes from the ground up, it seems like we're overdue for that on the desktop side. Of course people have tried, but each time it was part of making some mobile-desktop Frankenstein UI nobody wanted, not fixing the problem by itself. Using my Mac or Windows PC, it's very rare that I actually want an app to access files on its own that it didn't create. Like if I write a doc in Word, I'm only going to edit it in Word. I might want to email a copy to someone, but that doesn't mean Mail needs RW access to the original. I might copy a video clip into editing software, but again it doesn't need to touch the original. Programs often need their own dirs for caches, settings, etc, and those don't even need to be read by other programs. It's also annoying how they can write anywhere in ~/ and end up scattering stuff in random places. The iPhone sandboxing system works great for all that, where apps have to explicitly share to others. The Mac file access rules tried to address this but still seem like Swiss cheese while also getting in the way of normal usage, and there's seemingly nothing in Windows or Linux (unless you're going out of your way with jails). Other APIs besides file are a bigger challenge. That was gated away from the start on iPhones but not on desktop OSes. If they don't find a solution, web and mobile apps are going to keep taking over.

kccqzy 6mo ago
Your worldview aligns very well with what Apple is doing anyways. All you need to do is to use macOS, and only download apps from the Mac App Store (because they are sandboxed). And millions of non-technical Apple users are doing just that. It seems like what you describe is basically already a reality, so why is there a need for a reworking from the ground up?
- traderj0e 6mo ago
  It's still not like the iPhone sandboxing, it's a bandaid. Many of them genuinely need wide access to function, so just asking for permission doesn't really solve the problem. Like when you open a file in the picker, that's actually granting RW access to the entire dir permanently. On top of fixing the technical side, they need it to feel safe to the user, which right now it doesn't. Separately, idk if anyone is only installing from the Mac App Store. You can't even get Chrome that way. It's also just bad, like it bothers you about login, then apps get stuck in half-downloaded state. But yeah if anyone can pull this off, it'd be Apple, seeing how frequently they'll break apps by requiring new APIs.

kazinator 6mo ago

I Canada there is a character used in IKEA radio ads known as "Swedish Guy", who speaks with a funny accent. I'm reading that Swedish IT consultant's rant in the voice of Swedish Guy.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

GMoromisato 6mo ago

Except MS-DOS ultimately won. I grew up in Boston in the 80s, when giants like DEC and Data General were at the leading edge of computing. I remember mainframe folks complaining that "MS-DOS is so primitive! Here's a nickel, kid, buy yourself a real OS." By the 90s, when I was working on DOS/Windows software, I was inundated with resumes from engineers who had been laid off from those very same companies. And it wasn't until Windows XP in 2000 when most people moved away from DOS. I feel like every twenty years or so, kids look at the current computing landscape and say, "That's too complicated! I'm not going to learn all that--I'm just going to invent my own thing." DOS was that in the 80s, the Web in 2000. Maybe OpenClaw is that for the 2020s. AI is certainly going to reinvent everything. The DEC people were right about DOS: it was barely more than a toy. But we didn't abandon it and go back to the safety of VMS. Instead, we improved it until it had all the security and capabilities we needed. I don't know if OpenClaw is going to win or not, but if you remember MS-DOS, you wouldn't count it out.

d3Xt3r 6mo ago

> The sad days of DOS. Any program could peek and poke the kernel, hook interrupts, write anywhere on disk. Sad? That was the best part of DOS. Some of my fondest computing memories was on DOS - warts and all. Being able to live hexedit your drive and memory to cheat in games, the sheer freedom you got from hacking around the OS is incompatible to modern operating systems - even Linux. You were in full control of your computer and you decided how it could be used, not some mega corporation or compliance agency. DOS wasn't sad, it was fun.

tehologist 6mo ago
This was also when most of these machines were not online. Security wasn't as much of a concern.
Delk 6mo ago
You could do all of those things on an OS with proper security separation as long as you have full root access. There's no megacorp stopping you from reading and writing kernel memory. Unless, of course, the computer refuses to run software not signed by the megacorp or some software refuses to run without a digitally signed chain all the way down to the firmware like some game anticheats do. But that's not really because of things like permission boundaries for processes. You can have those and still be in full control of those boundaries. It may be more convoluted than in a barebones system like DOS, of course.
- hun3 5mo ago
  PatchGuard would like to have a word with you.

digimantis 6mo ago

to this day i still dont get why people get so crazy about openclaw. i am not saying it's not good. but it's not worth the hype. i am guessing maybe a lot of people who do not code agents dont even know chatgpt can complete automated tasks?

fuzzfactor 6mo ago

>For the first time, Wal-Mart could store customer info on a disk. Well, that may be the first time it wasn't a mainframe. Plus this is for the lay-away project of the mid-'80's when IBM-compatible PC's already existed. What most people don't realize is that before the IBM PC, Wal-Mart was way ahead of all other retailers with its POS, inventory, and logistics systems from all over the US tied into headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. Using telephone modems of course like anybody else, but this is before they had any "superstores", and were still quite small, nor were they in any big cities. Yet. But they were ready. Actually that was all Sam had ever been planning for since the beginning, but they had become quite successful enough already as the fastest growing chain of mainly rural "country stores". A typical Wal-Mart was dwarfed by a K-Mart store, and a full-size Sears seemed like a super store by comparison. They had mainframes and POS too but Wal-Mart just took it to the next level. Ran circles around them digitally. Really did scorch some earth with those kind of advantages when they came to the big cities, but after the PC came out I would say they regressed more toward the mean. The momentum still overwhelmed though.

sixhobbits 6mo ago

Seems like pro-openclaw arguments dressed up as anti ones. Author remembers MS DOS for a reason. I have similar concerns and somehow think openclaw will not be remembered in 30 years time so the comparison does not land for me

hun3 5mo ago

Ironic, since Unix is itself an embodiment of "worse is better."