What's wrong with it?

It's weird enough to feel performative but not weird enough to be interesting.

The tone, for one thing. Normal people don't care about "il Buco" nor about what some nobody has eaten while recounting things, articles like this one should solely focus on the "recounting things" part, not on the eating and name-dropping part.

Now, I get it that for the Anglos normal food might as well have been a thing given to us by the Gods up there in the sky, but, as I was saying, this should have been a thing of the past now, cooked fish is just cooked fish, cooked pasta is just cooked pasta, we don't care about that shit, get to the point of the article.

This is part of a certain type of journalism. You're free to dislike it but it's doing something very specific that most readers of this type of journalism and literature in general do enjoy. You may be coming to this with the (not unusual for the HN crowd) overly stemmy attitude that scans for nuggets of relevant data (and only relevant data!) that can be processed in the most efficient way possible. This is not it, and if it was forced to be we would lose something precious.

You're not wrong, but these people are not going away. This is New York magazine, Vulture section, they just talk about what people eat at the interview, that's what the same people like to read.

Ben Lerner is from that world. Very New York, very arty, very socialite. If I remember correctly one of his books sets place in Marfa, the Art center.

Ben Lerner is not what "normal people" read, nor is New York magazine.

I find the books pretty good, but I think I qualify as one of "them".

Probably they feel this is performative

It will take years before the effect will be felt but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.

> but I do believe since watching football has become so expensive younger generations are going to watch less of it.

Every now and then we go out to watch some of the finals for the national (Spanish) team, and the audience most of the time lean young still today in 2026, although of course it's very mixed more depending on the bar/restaurant you go to rather than the football itself. Even if the subscription prices are expensive today, affording 4 EUR for two beers during a game in a bar is affordable even to teenagers.

A consensus has formed in front of your eyes. The same development that resulted in you using the word "kill" in your earlier comment to refer to a computer process. For some reason you refuse to accept it.

Have you thought about why they developed a need for intellectual validation?

Can you give some example for what you use it for? I understand giving a summary of what's waiting in your inbox but what else?

Extending your driver's license.

Asking the bank for a second mortgage.

Finding the right high school for your kids.

The possibilities are endless.

/s <- okay

Any writers for Black Mirror hanging around here?

They were all acqu-hired by OpenAI.

It's the other way around: hckrnews hanging around in Charlie Brooker's brains...

Have you actually used it successfully for these purposes?

You've used it for these things?

seeing your edit now: okay, you got me. I'm usually not one to ask for sarcasm marks but.....at this point I've heard quite a lot from AIbros

Is this sarcasm? These all sound like things that I would never use current LLMs for.

Last one is research. But you don't need a claw.

I use it for stuff like this from my phone:

- Setup mailcow, anslytics, etc on my server.

- Run video generation model on my linux box for variations of this prompt

- At the end of every day analyze our chats, see common pain points and suggest tools that would help.

- Monitor my API traffic over night and give me a report in the morning of errors.

Im convinced this is going to be the future

I actually seriously want to hear about good use cases. So far I haven't found anything: either I don't trust the agent with the access because too many things can go wrong, or the process is too tailored to humans and I don't trust it to be able to habdle it.

For example, finding an available plumber. Currently involves Googling and then calling them one by one. Usually takes 15-20 calls before I can find one that has availability.

I asked mine to give me some motivational pep at 9am monday.

Now that could evolve and turn into a personal trainer keeping track of my progress.

What if I send it my heart rate. Etc. Prove I did it.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious but, being contained and only having access to specific credentials is all nice and well but there is still an agent that orchestrates between the containers that has access to everything with one level of indirection.

I "grew up" in the nascent security community decades ago.

The very idea of what people are doing with OpenClaw is "insane mad scientist territory with no regard for their own safety", to me.

And the bot products/outcome is not even deterministic!

That why I wrote "a VM or a separate host", "specific credentials" and "data provided to the agent must be considered compromised or leaked".

I should have added, "and every data returned by the agent must be considered harmful".

You should not trust anything done by an agent on the behalf of someone and certainly not giving RW access to all your data and credentials.

I don't see why you think there is. Put Openclaw on a locked down VM. Don't put anything you're not willing to lose on that VM.

But if we're talking about optionally giving it access to your email, PayPal etc and a "YOLO-outlook on permissions to use your creds" then the VM itself doesn't matter so much as what it can access off site.

Bastion hosts.

You don't give it your "prod email", you give it a secondary email you created specifically for it.

You don't give it your "prod Paypal", you create a secondary paypal (perhaps a paypal account registered using the same email as the secondary email you gave it).

You don't give it your "prod bank checking account", you spin up a new checking with Discover.com (or any other online back that takes <5min to create a new checking account). With online banking it is fairly straightforward to set up fully-sandboxed financial accounts. You can, for example, set up one-way flows from your "prod checking account" to your "bastion checking account." Where prod can push/pull cash to the bastion checking, but the bastion cannot push/pull (or even see) the prod checking acct. The "permissions" logic that supports this is handled by the Nacha network (which governs how ACH transfers can flow). Banks cannot... ignore the permissions... they quickly (immediately) lose their ability to legally operate as a bank if they do...

Now then, I'm not trying to handwave away the serious challenges associated with this technology. There's also the threat of reputational risks etc since it is operating as your agent -- heck potentially even legal risk if things get into the realm of "oops this thing accidentally committed financial fraud."

I'm simply saying that the idea of least privileged permissions applies to online accounts as well as everything else.

isn't the value proposition "it can read your email and then automatically do things"? if it can't read your email and then can't actually automatically do things... what's the point?

Yes -- definitely that's the value prop. But it's not binary all or nothing.

AI automation is about trust (honestly, same as human delegation).

You give it access to a little bit of data, just enough to do a basic useful thing or two, then you give it a bit of responsibility.

Then as you build confidence and trust, you give it a little more access, and allow it to take on a little more responsibility. Naturally, if it blows up in your face, you dial back access and responsibility quick.

As an analogy, folks drive their cars on the highway at 65-85+ MPH. Fatality rate goes up somewhat exponentially with speed and anything 60+ is considerably more deadly than ~30mph.

We're all so confident that a wheel won't randomly fall off because we've built so much trust with the quality of modern automobiles. But it does happen (I had a friend in high-school who's wheel popped off on a 45 mph road -- naturally he was going 50-55 IIRC).

In the early 1900s people would have thought you had a death wish to drive this fast. 25-30mph was normal then -- the automobiles at the time just weren't developed enough to be trusted at higher speeds.

My previous comment was about the fact that it is possible to build this sandboxing/bastion layer with live web accounts that allows for fine grained control over how much data you want to expose to the ai.

The value proposition is it is an agent with (some) memory. There are lots of use cases that don't involve giving access to your personal stuff. Even a simple "Monitor these companies' career pages and notify me of an opening in my city" is useful.

Setup automatic forwards. If I was to do this, I’d forward all the emails from my kids activities to its email.

So, as so many people have been saying: Don't give it access to (your) email, Paypal, etc.

It's a very general purpose tool. Complaining about it is like complaining that rm will let you delete /

So no internet access?

In my limited experience I found 5.3-Codex to be extremely dry, terse and to the point. I like it.

Maybe this will change one day but at the current moment this is an immediate turnoff. It's like someone trying to show you their project day 1 and it's a page filled with ads and a newsletter popup. You may have good reasons to do that but it doesn't instill a sense of trust and quality.

It is done because management needs to show that profits are increasing or they themselves will lose their jobs. Since they do not want to lose their jobs and they do not know how to increase profits they decided to fire 1700 employees with the hope that less expenses will translate into larger profits.

They've also done another thing:

>ASML also announced a new share buyback programme of up to €12 billion, to be executed by 31 December 2028.

They have €12 billion they don't know what to do with with so they will give it to shareholders, for a nice gain of less than 1% per year for the next 3 years. Assuming the annual salary costs of each of the 1700 employees is 150K (likely much much lower) those 12 billion could have paid for their employment for the next 47 years.

So was the last lottery winner. I can certainly improve my chances but there is a huge amount of luck involved.

And importantly, in this analogy - most people here aren't even able to play that lottery. He founded a company based on the research he did whilst studying for a government funded PhD. Most people are not in a position in their life where they could even spend time trying to do research that would result in this type of eventual wealth.

This is one of the easiest paths to gain a competitive advantage that can be monetized. You are much less likely to fall into a pool of money.

Just like becoming a MD has much better odds at getting you some amount of money than dropping out of school. About the same path by the way.

But you can keep playing the lottery if you think it has better odds or even the same odds...

If you don't try you are sure to not win. The rest is about being able to put the odds in your favor. You obviously can't do that with lottery. There is no logical lever.