Honestly, downtime has gotten way better as one of the people behind (https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com). Compared to 10 years ago things are so much more redundant and harder to take down.
Well, (a) why would they? (b) "uptime" has shifted from a binary "site up/down" to "degraded performance", which itself indicates improvements to uptime since we're both pickier and more precise.
Yes, I'm asking why they'd lock themselves into a contract around 5 9s of uptime since the parent poster mentioned that they won't do so. Of course, AWS actually does do this in some cases and they guarantee 99.99% for most things, so it feels a bit arbitrary - 5 minutes vs an hour, roughly.
I'm blown away by the comments. This is a cool project someone created with clear warnings about its current state (beta), and the community is being utterly disrespectful. They are building something that many people find useful/fascinating/intriguing/fun.
negativity rarely gets you far in life, however. Think about it. I don't use openclaw, don't see the need in my personal life, but i am also not shitting on it.
Yes the cynical tropes are getting tired by now, even though I personally agree with most of them.
But suspicions on the legitimacy of the stars seems reasonable, wouldn't you agree? Look at the rate of stars, look at the comments/issues/prs on the repo. It feels safe to assume that most of them are from bots and not organic humans who went out to star a cool project.
Why should people find an automated, buggy, risky slopworm for script kiddies that relies on an external slop provider who also gets all your data interesting?
This is the lowest, most boring form of programming.
I think if you dig into it and play with it, you will find that it is doing some really cool stuff. I started playing with it a few weeks ago, and I am having a blast messing around with it. Hoping to hook it up to a robot kit next month to try some fun stuff.
Are some people using it in absolutely shitty ways? Yes, but that isn't the majority of the people playing with it.
The negativity I am seeing here is off the charts and undserved.
It will have to get a lot of worse in order to get better. Voters have to be in a lot more pain to give the non-crazy party control to actually fix fundamental problems.
Note: I'm an independent, but the current administration is incompetent on an embarrassing level.
there is no need to rewrite it, because it's fine. What's not fine is people not observing it, and defending it with their lives, and making sure that violations are actioned with penalties, social stigma and disdain.
The fact that this conversation is happening at all is indicative that our current form of government and its founding documents were inadequate in preventing the existing situation.
If the constitution was appropriate, the people would have the explicit legal means of remedying this situation without relying on elections several years after the constitutional crises was underway.
A piece of paper doesn't make any difference if what's written is not observed, nor the rules it laid out followed. The fact that the president can commit crimes - like declaring war without the approval of congress - and have no consequences, means that the problem isn't with the written text, it's in enforcing it. And citizens can only enforce it with elections, or with civil unrest.
I would say that the constitution not enshrining a method of enforcement outside the auspices of the executive branch is an inherent failing of the document. Which would then indict its inability to be amended as originally intended over time.
The fact that it was intended to be a living document and has not remained so, I would argue, is partially responsible for our current predicament.
The legal remedy is impeachment. That was tried twice, and in subsequent elections “the people” reacted by moving us even farther away from being able to use it. There’s no constitutional problem here; there’s a people problem.
You are blind. The senate and electoral college and lack of clearly distributed powers have meant that we have never functioned as a liberal democracy despite our lofty rhetoric claiming otherwise.
Everyone acts like the electoral college was a blunder. The founding fathers studied the democracies of ancient Greece, and they made a very intentional choice to guard against unfettered democracy. You were supposed to be involved in local politics, where you could actually know and evaluate your representatives. Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president.
I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
> Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president.
This is, incidentally, how we massively screwed up the federal government. In the original design US Senators were elected by the state legislatures, the premise being that they would prevent federal overreach into the regulatory domain of the states because they would be directly accountable to the state governments.
Then populists who wanted to do everything at the federal level pushed for the 17th Amendment which eliminated the state governments' representation in the federal government and people stopped caring about local politics because it started feeling like an exercise in futility when federal law could preempt anything you wanted to do and the thing meant to keep that in check was deleted.
And the federal government was supposed to have enumerated (i.e. narrow, limited) powers. It doesn't have the scaffolding for people to hold it accountable. You can elect the local dogcatcher but the only elected office in the entire federal executive branch is the President of the United States. Which is fine when the main thing they're doing is negotiating treaties and running the Post Office but not fine if you're trying to do thousands of pages of federal regulations on everything from healthcare to banking to labor to energy.
That's somewhat ahistorical, the 17th amendment happened because state legislatures were frequently deadlocked and could not appoint senators, meaning states went without senate representation entirely.
In a fifteen year period 46 senate elections were deadlocked in 20 states, at one point Delaware had an open senate seat for four years due to this.
That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force, not moving for senators to be elected by the people.
> That's somewhat ahistorical, the 17th amendment happened because state legislatures were frequently deadlocked and could not appoint senators, meaning states went without senate representation entirely.
That seems more like an excuse than a legitimate reason. If that was actually the problem you could solve it by adopting a mechanism to break ties, putting the vote to the public only in the event of a tie, having the state legislatures use score voting which makes two candidates getting exactly the same score far less likely, etc.
But if they want to do a power grab then they get further by saying "we have to do something about these deadlocks" than by saying "we want to do a power grab".
> That said the proper reform to this would've been the abolition of the senate, as it has always been and will always be an anti-democratic force
It's supposed to be an anti-democratic force, like the Supreme Court, the existence of Constitutional rights and the entire concept of even having a federal government instead of allowing local voters to have full plenary power over local laws. Unconstrained direct democracy is a populist whirlwind of impulsive reactionary forces.
> Unconstrained direct democracy is a populist whirlwind of impulsive reactionary forces.
This is a great point as is the point that the existence of a federal government itself is anti-democratic.
The Senate was initially created as a body that was incentivized to promote federalism itself (especially through their power to approve federal judges) & a federalist republic seems to be the most democratic system because it incentivizes a balance between individual liberty & the ability to restrict someone else's liberty through law.
Right now, the balance of power is too centralized which makes for radical changes every time a different political party takes control of government.
> I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
Randomly-selected citizens would have outperformed what we’ve gotten in the last few elections at minimum.
>I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
I reject this premise. I'm not omniscient but I have a pretty good idea.
That doesn't really fit the math. At the time of the founding the largest colony was Virginia and of the original 13 colonies, 9 were in the North and only 4 were states that ended up in the Confederacy, i.e. it was the slave states that were underrepresented in the electoral college and the Senate.
That's independent of the EC. They could have given the slave owners 3/5ths of a vote for each slave without the EC. And obviously that part of the system is no longer in operation, whereas the part Democrats complain about is that each state gets +2 electoral votes regardless of its population.
Which nominally gives slightly more weight to the lower population rural states, but that isn't even the primary consequence of the EC. The primary consequence is that it gives significantly more weight to swing states, which by definition don't favor any given party.
> They could have given the slave owners 3/5ths of a vote for each slave without the EC
Yes, I suppose if you could accept the idea of a ludicrous hypothetical alternative that would have zero chance in reality of being implemented you can contort yourself enough to ignore that the EC is part of the compromise on slavery that forms the Constitution.
It's ludicrous by modern standards because the premise of owning other people is ludicrous by modern standards. Giving states more votes based on them having people there who can't actually vote is exactly the same amount of ludicrous, but that's also the part that isn't there anymore.
The primary thing the electoral college does in modern day is allow -- not even require -- states to allocate all of their state's voting power to the candidate that wins the majority of the state. With the result that they mostly do that and then states like New York and Texas get ignored in Presidential elections because nobody expects them to flip and getting 10% more of the vote is worthless when it doesn't flip the state.
Ironically it's the partisans who are effectively disenfranchising the people in their own state. If the states that go disproportionately for one party didn't want to be ignored then all they'd have to do is allocate their electoral votes proportionally according to what percent of the vote the candidate got in that state. Then getting 10% more of the vote in a big state would be as many electoral votes as some entire states. But the non-swing states are by definition controlled by one party and then they're willing to screw over their own population to prevent the other party from getting any of that state's electoral votes.
Virginia was a slave state at that time (I think it was 8 slave states to 5 non). The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.
Indeed Virginia was a slave state at the time, and was later part of the Confederacy, and it was the most underrepresented state in the Senate and electoral college at the founding, since those bodies cause higher population states to be underrepresented relative to their population.
> The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.
All of the states had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed. But it was already gathering detractors even then. The states that wanted to keep it the most were the ones that ended up in the Confederacy and they were both a minority of the original colonies and a minority of the states at the time of the civil war.
> Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
Not for nothing, but the party that bangs on hardest about the sanctity and infallibility of the Electoral College is the one that is far and away the worst for "American Idol-type politicians". In recent times:
Then we must repeal the state laws criminalizing electors not voting in line with the states popular vote allocation, and directly elect electors to ensure they are people of sound morals and judgement rather than partisan hacks. Because at the moment the electoral college serves no function besides distorting the popular vote. Any other possible function has been removed by law.
I don't think everyone is being greedy cowards. Our system is designed to domesticate people through threat of poverty or state sanctioned violence.
Resistance is difficult because it typically requires great personal sacrifice. It's hard to protest when you have to work to feed and shelter your family. It's hard to resist law enforcement when your life is the price.
The working class's current inability to resist tyranny isn't an accident.
it always takes sacrifice to resist tyranny. It's just that there's been less tyranny in the past half century, that the new generation raised have not had to make sacrifices, and thus don't feel they need to. Surely, somebody else will make that sacrifice when the time comes...
Millenials have been killed by the current admin, and both Gen Z and Millenials have been in the streets across the country consistently since the current admin took office. Not sure what news you're consuming that you would think the way you do.
The "constitution is good, we just need to follow it" attitude missed out on the rot that occurred before Trump that enabled Trump and supports him to this day. That rot occured under both parties, when guardrails were followed and rules were in place and observed.
The Constitution was expected - as described in the document itself - to be reviewed and revised and updated every 20 years or so.
The last one proposed and ratified was in 1971, 55 years ago, the 26th, around lowering the voting age. (Yes, there is a 27th, but that was proposed in 1789 and just took two centuries to be ratified - guess what it was about? Prohibiting Congress from changing their own pay in the current election cycle...).
Agreed. And in my opinion, a big part of the rot was that Congress became progressively more dysfunctional. (When was the last time they passed an annual budget? That is the most basic job of Congress, and they haven't been able to do it for years.)
I'm not going to argue the "progressively dysfunctional". The Hastert Rule has a lot to do with that. Individual members can't cut deals for votes any more. But it looks like there have been appropriations bills every year.
Don't take this as disagreement with your basic assertion. Failing to declare war since 1941, failing to impeach and convict Clinton, failure to impeach and convict Trump at least once, the House checks and balances Dem presidents, and aids and abets Republicans. It's a gerontocractic farce.
I agree with you, but I don't see these things as possible. Maybe the D party will enact campaign finance rules if they got a super majority. Given gerrymandering I'm not sure that is ever possible though.
People really need to understand the math here instead of listening to what politicians themselves self-interestedly complain about.
The modern balance of power remains on a razor's edge and constantly flips because both parties have learned to run data-driven campaigns. That would be as true if neither party did gerrymandering as if both parties do as they do now. Whatever the district which is closest to being flipped, that's the one where they would concentrate their resources. If one party started to get significantly more than 50% of the seats and the other significantly less, the loser would change some of their positions until they were back in the running because getting some of what you want with 51% of the seats is better than getting none of what you want with 39% of the seats.
The actual problem is not the electoral college or gerrymandering or The Despicable Other Party, it's first past the post voting, because that's what creates a two party system. Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens.
> Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens.
There have been ongoing efforts to ban things like ranked choice or other options at the state level and now it's being pushed federally (Make Elections Great Again act MEGA).
That's true, but it's not honest. What actually happened is there were TWO parts to it.
The first part, which is the part people actually read:
> "The amendment also changes a line in the Missouri Constitution to specify that “only” U.S. citizens have the right to vote, rather than “all” U.S. citizens."
The second part banned rank voice voting.
Nobody, I mean nobody read the second part.
The first part of the ballot measure was _already illegal_. It was simply used as a tool to scare people into voting against rank choice voting.
At least one place in Alaska, I think two boroughs, have local laws that allow RCV.
Ranked choice voting sucks anyway, and that section doesn't seem to prohibit score voting. You're not "voting" for more than one candidate, you're scoring all of them; you're not "ranking" candidates, you're scoring them (and you could e.g. give two candidates the same score); you're not reallocating votes from one candidate to another, you're electing the candidate with the highest score.
It's also not clear that bill is going to pass. It seems full of other things Democrats have a major incentive to filibuster.
It's not even clear that Republicans have any reason to prevent score voting. One of the failure modes of ranked choice is that you can end up with more radical candidates winning where one party already had a majority because it allows the majority party to run a radical candidate next to a moderate one, but then if the radical candidate gets more votes from their own party, the race becomes the radical vs. the minority party after the majority party's moderate candidate got excluded, and then the radical candidate wins. They saw what happened in New York and didn't like it. But Democrats should have exactly the same concern -- what do you think that does if you adopted it in the South -- and in general ranked choice makes polarization worse. Ranked choice actually does suck.
Whereas score voting does something else. If you run a radical, a moderate from the major party and a minority party, the moderate from the majority party wins because there is no run off election, they just got the highest score because they scored better among the minority party than the radical and better among the majority party than the minority party candidate. And when more candidates than that run, the most likely to win is the one that best represents the entire district, which reduces polarization, and that's to the benefit of everybody.
Look around at the politics of the majority of countries on the planet. Voters being in pain doesn't mean they suddenly start making the right choice. Quite the opposite in fact.
There's a long way to go on the path the USA is currently on. Ask anyone from India or Russia or Argentina or Egypt or Nigeria how democracy actually works.
The electorate does give control but they get bored after a few years and want to wreck everything all over again. It's goldfish levels of political memory in this country.
It’s not just the incompetence, it’s the meanness. If this administration were simply incompetent, it would be bad but not alarming or scary. It’s the fact that they want to hurt a portion of the population that worries me greatly.
I mean Eisenhower was the Republican President immediately leading up to LBJ signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 64-65 (i.e. the inflection point of the D/R "switch") and would realistically be considered a Democrat president:
- Accepted the New Deal
- Championed the Interstate Highway system (massive federal spending)
Hah, I read that as well and made a big "hmmmmmmmmm" sound...
The last time I talked to someone about OpenClaw and how it is helping them, they told me it tells them what their calendar has for them today or auto-tweets for them (i.e., non-human spam). The first is as simple as checking your calendar, and the second is blatant spam.
Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for AI code assistance?
This should be the opening for every post about the various "innovations" in the space.
Preferably with a subsequent line about the manual process that was worth putting the extra effort into prior to the shiny new thing.
I really can imagine a better UX then opening my calendar in one-click and manual scanning.
Another frequent theme is "tell me the weather." One again, Google home (alexa or whatever) handles it while I'm still in bed and let's me go longer without staring at a screen.
The spam use-case is probably the best use-case I've seen, as in it truly saves time for an equal or better result, but that means being cool with being a spammer.
A dev on my team was trying to get us to setup OpenClaw, harping on about how it would make our lives easier etc, etc. (even though most of the team was against the idea due to the security issues and just not thinking it would be worth it).
Their example use case was for it to read and summarize our Slack alerts channel to let us know if we had any issues by tagging people directly... the Slack channel is populated by our monitoring tools that also page the on-call dev for the week.
The kicker... this guy was the on-call dev that week and had just been ignoring the Slack channel, emails and notifications he was getting!
This is a pretty simple thing to boil the ocean over but it was fun nonetheless.
I've been applying for jobs but I don't want Gmail notifications on my phone because of all the spam, I'm really picky about push notifications. I told my openclaw adjacent ai bot to keep an eye and let me know if any of the companies I applied to send me an email. Worked great. CEO LARPing at its finest.
Also a big fan of giving it access to my entire obsidian vault so if I'm on the go instead of trying to use obsidian on the phone I just tell it what I need to read or update.
I'm not running openclaw itself. I am building a simpler version that I trust and understand a lot more but ostensibly it's just another always on Claude code wrapper.
Not via OpenClaw, but I automate breakdowns of my analytics and I recently started getting digests of social media conversations relevant to my interests. It's also good for monitoring services and doing first line triage on issues.
I think a sizable proportion of people just want to play "large company exec". Their dream is to have an assistant telling them how busy their day is, all the meetings they have, then to go to those meetings and listen to random fluff people tell them while saying "mmh yeah what a wise observation" or "mmh no not enough synergy here, let's pivot and really leave our mark on this market, crunch the numbers again".
I can't come up with any other explanation for why there seems to be so many people claiming that AI is changing their life and workflow, as if they have a whole team of junior engineers at their disposal, and yet have really not that much to show for it.
They're so white collar-pilled that they're in utter bliss experiencing a simulation of the peak white collar experience, being a mid-level manager in meetings all day telling others what to do, with nothing tangible coming out of it.
Everybody here probably already has an opinion about the utility of coding agents, and having it manage your calendar isn't terribly inspired, but there is a lot more you can do.
To be specific, for the past year I've been having numerous long conversations about all the books I've read. I talk about what I liked, didn't like, the ideas and and plots I found compelling or lame, talks about the characters, the writing styles of authors, the contemporary social context the authors might have been addressing, etc. Every aspect of the books I can think off. Then I ask it for recommendations, I tell it given my interests and preferences, suggest new books with literary merit.
ChatGPT just knocks this out of the park, amazing suggestions every time, I've never had so much fun reading than in the past year. It's like having the world's best read and most patient librarian at your personal disposal.
My experience with plain Claude Code is that I can step back and get an overview of what I'm doing, since I tend to hyperfocus on problems, preventing me from having a simultaneous overview.
It does feel like being a project manager (a role I've partially filled before) having your agency in autopilot, which is still more control than having team members do their thing.
So while it may feel very empowering to be the CEO of your own computer, the question is if it has any CEO-like effect on your work.
Taking it back to Claude Code and feeling like a manager, it certainly does have a real effect for me.
I won't dispute that running a bunch of agents in sync won't give you an extension of that effect.
The marketing of OpenClaw is amazing. They had a one-liner install that didn't work, started the hype-train days before they changed the name of the product and have everyone from nerd influencers to CNBC raving about it.
> Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for AI code assistance
Well... no. But I do really like it. It's just an always-on Claude you can chat with in Telegram, that tries to keep context, that has access to a ton of stuff, and it can schedule wakeup times for itself.
> Anyone found some good use cases beyond a better interface for AI code assistance?
Yesterday, I saw a demo of a product similar to OpenClaw. It can organize your files and directories and works really great (until it doesn't, of course). But don't worry, you surely have a backup and need to test the restore function anyway. /s
Edit:
So far, I haven’t found a practical use case for this. To become truly useful, it would need access to certain resources or data that I’m not comfortable sharing with it.
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