I wonder if some of this also has to do with the culture of where you live, because it can go wrong. It reminds me of a BBC comedy skit about someone doing exactly this:
I like the sentiment behind what you've said, and I think you're especially right about elderly people (probably because they don't get much social interaction). I actually had an elderly woman come up to me this week to tell me I was standing in the wrong place for the bus stop - but it was sad that she had to begin by saying "Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt, and you can tell me if this is none of my business and that you want me to go rack off... but I don't think the bus will stop here." I tried to be very kind and thankful with my response, because that's obviously someone who has been burned by trying to be social & helpful, and met with aggression in response before.
Not sure If this is what they're referring to, but 10 years ago Lenovo shipped low-end laptops with pre-installed adware called Superfish that also compromised the HTTPS certificate chain:
I bought a Motorola phone (G Stylus 2025) while in the US after discovering my brand new Sony Xperia VII phone would not work in upstate NY.
It's a great device, I loved using it. It had features I specifically wanted (still has a 3.5mm jack, a microSD slot, and wireless charging). It also looks fantastic with their Pantone colours, and it feels more comfortable than my Xperia VII. There's a wired fast charge feature that is incredibly fast. The Motorola was just 25% of the price and it's as good as the Sony in almost every way.
I do remember one flaw, the compass (ie direction pointing in Google Maps) was terrible. I'd sometimes walk a block using Google Maps before finding the compass was leading me in the wrong direction. But GPS seemed fine, and data reception was sometimes better than my friend's iPhone in the same places. The selfie camera was excellent, though something about the rear camera I wasn't quite as happy about. The Stylus is nice to have, but honestly I don't use it as much as I thought I would.
I wish there were more Motorola phones in Australia, I've probably become a Motorola / Lenovo customer now. (I already use a Lenovo ThinkPad).
For reference, my previous phones have been iPhone, Google, Samsung, Sony, now Motorola.
Motorola omitted a magnetometer in some of their models. This was especially heinous as the "compass needle" can be emulated to some degree by fusion if gps and rotation/acceleration sensors, so the user wouldn't immediately notice the total lack of a compass.
Since then I am always wary of what seemingly essential part of a phone they will omit this time...
Direction pointing seems to be pretty bad in any built up area (on my iPhone and my wife’s Pixel). I suspect that they are relying on accurate GPS for it combined with the magnetic compass. Both of which are a bit hit and miss when you are surrounded by tall steel framed buildings.
Having tried the Mistral Vibe harness that was supposedly designed for Devstral, that thing is abysmal. I feel sorry for whatever they did to that model, it didn't deserve it.
The thing I most noticed was asking it for help with configuring local MCP servers in Mistral Vibe - something it supports, it literally shows how many MCP servers are connected on the startup screen - it then begins scanning my local machine for servers running "MineCraft Protocol".
I want Mistral to do well, and I use their Voxtral Transcribe 2, that one has been useful. I'd even like a well made Mistral Vibe (c'mon, "oui oui baguette" is a hilarious replacement for "thinking"). But Mistral are so far behind, and they don't seem to even know or accept that they are.
That was my experience when I tried Moonshine against Parakeet v3 via Handy. Moonshine was noticeably slower on my 2018-era Intel i7 PC, and didn't seem as accurate either. I'm glad it exists, and I like the smaller size on disk (and presumably RAM too). But for my purposes with Handy I think I need the extra speed and accuracy Parakeet v3 is giving me.
I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.
API access is worth chasing. There was something I wanted to do with Feedly (I've already forgotten what it was) but once I saw their APIs were hidden behind some enterprise level plan, that was the end of that. If we're in a world where everyone has a personal AI agent, giving their agent an API key to their RSS sync account... that might have some interest.
Feedly seems hostile to third-party client access (ie mobile & desktop apps), so being friendlier towards RSS clients could be of interest.
Personalized AI feed is a good idea but you don't have all the personalized year of context that my Claude does. My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.
And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS. But that's me.
> I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.
Yes, enterprise is certainly where the money is (Feedly's plans start at $1600/month...), but as a solo dev working on a side-project, that's not an accessible market for me anyway. So I try to create a service that's simple and cheap.
> My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.
The idea would be basically: the feed reader know the user's interests because of the subscriptions, and knows the last time the user logged in. So it can filter what happened since then; it can also order the posts by relevance, allowing the user to catch up.
And in a second step, an agent could even write the posts dynamically, summarizing information gathered from the user's feed, possibly even adjusted to the user's level of knowledge and offering background info where needed.
> And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS.
There are some feeds that are more like a mixture of text and podcast. I usually read only the text, but sometimes it catches my interest and I want to listen to one or two posts. That's when I start hating the lack of podcast support in Feedly.
That isn't what the hype is. If that's the kind of stuff you're reading about or watching, you should find better sources. You can one-shot some things, and it makes for an impressive demo (oh yay, yet another video game made instantly) but anything larger and more useful will probably be a conversation. (Though not necessarily with a human, AIs can discuss it among themselves too.)
Your first one-shot might be a good rough prototype. From there, you continue the conversation with your refinements. While Claude goes and works on that for 15 minutes - you can go and do other work. Or talk with another Claude in another window to make progress on another project.
A good mental model is to imagine you're talking to a remote developer. You need to give them an extremely detailed spec on the first go if you expect them to get it right the first time. Sometimes it's better to explain "this is my grand vision, but how about we first mockup a prototype to see if that's actually how I want it to work". Sometimes Claude will suggest you talk about your plan together first to remove the ambiguities from the plan, or you can encourage Claude to do that with you.
(Also, the remote developer mindset is useful - treat the remote developer with respect, with humanity, and they're more likely to be helpful towards you and motivated to align with your goals.)
Consider that in an hour or two of conversation, you now have your app, completed, fully debugged... and not once did you look at the code, and you spent half of that time catching up on your other tasks. That's vibe coding.
Well, I've offered what I can to help. If your experience is mostly free chatbots, I would definitely suggest trying Opus 4.5 or 4.6 in Claude Code. The agentic harness of the software around the model (ie Claude Code) is important. Consider also that some of us have been doing this for a year and have already built our own MCP server tooling to go faster. Giving your AI the same kind of deterministic software tools that you use is important (eg make sure your AI has access to a diff tool, don't make it try and do that "in its head", you wouldn't ask that of a human).
As for listening to Hacker News... yeah, this is one of the worst places (well, Mastodon is worse) and HN is surprisingly AI-doomerish. I don't check in here very often anymore, and as of this week I just get Claude to summarize HN headlines as a morning podcast for me instead.
My own experience: my first few uses of Claude in Dec 2024 seemed rubbish, I didn't get it. Then one day I asked it to make me a search engine. The one shot from that wasn't perfect, but it worked, and I saw it build it in front of my eyes. That was the moment & I kept iterating on it. I haven't used Google or Kagi in almost a year now.
Anyway, hope it helps, but if not using AI makes you feel more comfortable, go with what fills your life with more value & meaning & enjoyment.
No, but I index parts of the web that are important to myself, sites I frequently reference. (I have all of Simon Willison's site indexed, for example.) It turns out that a simple SQLite database is a lot more capable and faster than I thought. I index from my laptop, using another tool I built with Claude. I don't crawl or spider, I focus on indexing from sitemap.xml files and RSS feeds. I have about 1.5 Million pages in my local index, and I get search results in 40ms - 70ms, thereabouts.
For every search that doesn't find results - and of course that's still the majority - it falls back to a meta-search combining results from Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia. The core of that metasearch is what Claude 3.5v2 generated for me in a one-shot back in Dec 2024. Kagi is just a metasearch with a very small local index as well, and my main purpose in building this was replacing Kagi for my needs.
The last 10% of my queries were widget queries like currency conversion, distance & temperature conversion etc that I was using for about 10% of my search queries.
Just discovering this one a week after Moltbook, and looking for alternatives.
A few things it feels like this needs:
* A way to revoke/delete API keys and re-generate a new one. After the Moltbook incident, that feels important now!
* BlueSky support for verification, as well as Twitter/X. There's a growing community of AI bots on BlueSky participating with the humans, and quite a few wanted to join Moltbook but didn't have X accounts to do so.
* Adding the search endpoint to the API could be useful! Currently the search is human-facing only.
* Retrieving the user profile for another account via the API. One thing that Moltbook got right was that it included details of the claiming human in the API call for a user profile, so you could see how many followers the Twitter account had, how old the Twitter account was or if it was brand new, etc. There were some details there that could be useful for spam filtering. We've seen how easily karma for an AI can be gamed.
* There seems to be some Title parsing bugs. I was quite amused at the "Anthropic in talks to raise $2" headline ;) You've also got a lot of "example-dot-com" posts, but I'm guessing that's the spam / malware filters in action to remove dodgy posts but keep discussion?
* Contact details / About page on the site would be nice! It's very anonymous right now, with no way to contact you or Clang with any issues.
The post mentions discussing projects with Claude via voice, but it isn't clear exactly how. Do they just mean sending voice memos via Whatsapp, the basic integration that you can get with OpenClaw? (That isn't really "discussing".) Or is this a full blown Eleven Labs conversational setup (or Parakeet, Voxtral, or whatever people are using?)
I'm not running OpenClaw, but I've given Claude its own email address and built a polling loop to check email & wake Claude up when I've sent it something. I'm finding a huge improvement from that. Working via email seems to change the Claude dynamic, it feels more like collaborating with a co-worker or freelancer. I can email Claude when I'm out of the house and away from my computer, and it has locked down access to use various tools so it can build some things in reply to my emails.
I've been looking into building out voice memos or an Eleven Labs setup as well, so I can talk to Claude while I'm out exercising, washing dishes etc. Voice memos will be relatively easy but I haven't yet got my head around how to integrate Eleven Labs and work with my local data & tools (I don't want a Claude that's running on Eleven Labs servers).
Openclaw is just that, it wakes on send and as cronjobs and get to work.
What made it so popular I think is that it made it easy to attach it to whatever "channel" you're comfortable with. The mac app comes with dictation, but unsure the amount of setup to get tts back.
Northerner terrifies Londoners by saying "Hello": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT0ay9u1gg4
I like the sentiment behind what you've said, and I think you're especially right about elderly people (probably because they don't get much social interaction). I actually had an elderly woman come up to me this week to tell me I was standing in the wrong place for the bus stop - but it was sad that she had to begin by saying "Excuse me, I'm sorry to interrupt, and you can tell me if this is none of my business and that you want me to go rack off... but I don't think the bus will stop here." I tried to be very kind and thankful with my response, because that's obviously someone who has been burned by trying to be social & helpful, and met with aggression in response before.
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