That makes no sense...unless the economy is an a sort of death spiral where companies layoff employees, then stock goes, then companies layoff more, then stock goes up, so on and so forth.
The price of stock is based in dollars. The value of the dollar goes down due to inflation, so the stock goes up, while not actually changing in value.
We are not old, there is a reason the generation is said (in stats and polls) to be less professional than prior generations when entering the workforce
It's not about generations, it's about professionalism. This generation, on average, decided that professionalism is not their thing, at least that is the prevailing sentiment.
People who don't adhere to professional standards find fewer job opportunities and lower pay. The market will work things out
I remember hearing that people used it as a way to signal that they were too busy, too on the go, too important to use proper punctuation..it was an obnoxious c suite trend as long as I can remember. Like you're always trying to signal that you were doing all of your comms from your cell phone between meetings/travelling. Given this article's tone and content I would say that what the author is trying to emulate or convey , maybe subconciously.
Interesting. I am a millennial and I never did this, nor did I have any friends that did. But I know m nephews deliberately turn off the auto edit in there iphones.
> It also runs on my own computer, and the latest frontier open source models are able to drive it (Kimi, etc). The future is going to be locally hosted and ad free and there’s nothing Big Tech can do about it. It’s glorious.
After messing with openclaw on an old 2018 Windows laptop running WSL2 that I was about to recycle, I am coming to the same conclusion, and the paradigm shift is blowing my mind. Tinkerers paradise.
Same here. I like tinkering with my Home Assistant setup and small web server running miscellaneous projects on my Raspberry Pi, but I hate having to debug it from my phone when it all falls over while I'm not near my computer.
Being able to chat with somebody that has a working understanding of a Unix environment and can execute tasks like "figure out why Caddy is crash looping and propose solutions" for a few dollars per month is a dream come true.
I'm not actually using OpenClaw for that just yet, though; something about exposing my full Unix environment to OpenAI or Anthropic just seems wrong, both in terms of privacy and dependency. The former could probably be solved with some redacting and permission-enforcing filter between the agent and the OS, but the latter needs powerful local models. (I'll only allow my Unix devops skills to start getting rusty once I can run an Opus 4.5 equivalent agent on sub-$5000 hardware :)
This is exactly the problem I've been working on. We're building a fork of OpenClaw with credential isolation baked in — agents use fake tokens, a broker intercepts the request and injects the real credentials at the HTTP layer. The agent never sees the actual API key or secret.
The analogy that clicked for us was SQL prepared statements: you separate the query structure from the data. Same idea here — separate the command structure from the secrets.
It's called SEKS (Secure Execution Keyless System). Still early but the passthrough proxy supports OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Notion, and a few others. Site is at seksbot.com and the code is at github.com/SEKSBot.
Honest answer: OpenClaw still requires some tinkering, but it's getting easier.
The biggest barrier for non-tinkerers is the initial setup - Node.js, API keys, permissions, etc. Once it's running, day-to-day use is pretty straightforward (chat with it like any other messaging app).
That said, you'll still need to:
- Understand basic API costs to avoid surprises
- Know when to restart if it gets stuck
- Tweak settings for your specific use case
If you're determined to skip tinkering entirely, I'd suggest starting with just the messaging integration (WhatsApp/Telegram) and keeping skills/tools minimal. That's the lowest-friction path.
For setup guidance without deep technical knowledge, I found howtoopenclawfordummies.com helpful - it's aimed at beginners and covers the common gotchas.
Is it transformative without tinkering? Not yet. The magic comes from customization. But the baseline experience (AI assistant via text) is still useful.
Honestly, not yet — unless you're willing to spend a weekend on setup. The Docker install is rough, skills break, and you'll hit config issues.
That said, there are now pre-built hardware options specifically for people who don't want to tinker. I've been running OpenClaw on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano — it came pre-configured with everything (Telegram, browser automation, cron jobs) working out of the box. Draws about 15W, completely silent, sits on my desk 24/7.
The "transformative" part for me isn't any single feature — it's having a persistent assistant that remembers context across sessions and can act on things while I'm away. But yeah, the DIY path is definitely not there yet for non-technical users.
I highly doubt they did this correlation properly. It looks like they just correlated two time series. Both series are correlated with time (both go up over time) and not each other. I eyeballed the series and correlated just the directions, when BTC goes up, it is 50/50 whether or not imports went up. I am pretty sure this correlation would be near 0 if you detrended the time series.
"Will AI replace software engineers?" is not the right question and stems from a misunderstanding of how tech affects humans and how they work.
Tech is a tool. It will take away some jobs, and then create new ones. Think of a combine tractor -- it took away crop picking jobs, but created a new job of combine tractor driver. It bumps productivity.
The correct frame is "how can software engineers (or anyone, for that matter) use AI to increase my productivity?" With that frame, AI does not replace engineers; rather, engineers are in the best position to understand how it deliver products faster and implement that understanding.
Combine tractors deleted jobs. You can't say there are as many combine tractor drivers as there were crop pickers. Anyway they don't need drivers now as they're fully robotic.
The only reason society didn't collapse: there were enough other jobs to absorb those displaced workers. Will there always be?
But we were also able to feed a lot more people for a lot fewer resources in a lot less time.
> Combine tractors deleted jobs.
Number of jobs is not the metric to key off of. If that were the case, we should get rid of combine tractors and pay people to farm by hand bc it would increase the number of jobs.
That's been a suggestion to avoid societal collapse. People could be paid to do useless menial work as a proof of work, so that people will still have money and society won't collapse.
I wish this were a recent development, connected to major improperly reviewed code changes provided by LLMs, but let us be honest, MSFT has had an appalling, frankly embarrassing track record in this regard dating back literally a decade plus now.
I've experienced it more than once on my Surface back in the day [0], the entire globe was affected by Crowdstrike which also was caused by a lack of testing on MSFTs part and there are numerous other examples of crashes, boot loops and BSODs caused by changes they made throughout the years [1].
Frankly, simply, no matter whether the code changes are provided by the worst LLM or the most skilled human experts, it appears their review process has been faulty for a long time. Bad code making it into updates is not the fault of any new tools, nor (in the past) of unqualified developers since, frankly and simply, the review process should have caught all of these.
Mac OS can be buggy and occasionally is a bit annoying in my case (Tahoe though is actually rather stable besides a few visual glitches for me, surprising considering a lot of my peers are having more issues with it over 25) but I have yet to see it fail to boot solely due to an update.
Linux distros like Silverblue have never been broken due to an update in my experience (though there are famous examples like what happened a while back with PopOS). With immutable distros like Silverblue, even if you intentionally brick the install (or an update does break it), you just select the OSTree prior to the change and resolve any issue instantly.
For an OS one is supposed to pay for both with money and by looking at ads, Windows has been in an inexcusable state long before LLMs were a thing. Considering such major, obvious issues as "system doesn't start anymore" have been falling through code review for over a decade now, imagine what else has fallen through the cracks...
It isn't and I am apparently suffering from some very early onset dementia, so thanks for correcting me.
I, for some inexplicable reason, totally forgot that the whole Crowdstrike debacle was so bad because they could directly distribute faulty code to running systems, bypassing MSFT, staggered roll outs, etc.
I, again total mistake on my part, somehow had the mistaken memory that the changes were distributed via Windows Update, when the opposite being the case was what made that so bad.
Basically, mea culpa, honestly simple error and thanks for calling it out.
Having done contract development work for a number of different-sized software companies, a common rule I've noticed is the quality of the product is directly proportional to how many QA staff are employed. Clients that had me in direct contact with their QA teams provided high-quality bug reports, consistent reproduction steps, and verification of fixes that I could trust. Clients that did not have a QA team, where I was working directly with developers, usually had extremely fraught bug/fix/test cycles, low quality reproduction steps, fix validation that turned out to be not actually validated.
It's difficult for companies, especially big ones, because QA seems like purely a cost. The benefits are not obvious, so they're easy to cut when lean times come. But having people dedicated to the role of Assuring Quality actually really does accomplish that. If you are not delivering quality software, you are going to destroy user trust and lose to competitors. If the company is cutting QA staff disproportionately, that's a sign the leaders don't know what they're doing, and you should be looking for the exit (both as an employee & as a user).
I don't know what the right number of QA staff is, but it's probably higher than you think. At a small company I worked at previously, it was about 1 QA staff per 4 developers. That felt all right, but I certainly would have been happy to have more QA staff available to validate my work more quickly.
Fair point, outside my rose coloured memories of Windows 2000, it was likely never a beacon of stability. This is all purely subjective, but in my, frankly not always very reliable memory, I still have the distinct feeling that what has changed is the "in version progression" for lack of a better term.
A fresh install of a later Service Pack Windows XP or Vista did, again purely in my recollection, behaved a lot more stably on the same system to a fresh install of an earlier instance.
8.1 also is of particular note (unpopular UX not withstanding), it worked incredibly solidly on a Netbook with a big colourful sticker proudly proclaiming an entire Gigabyte of memory back in the day, even when using it for image editing via GIMP, for what it's worth.
That makes no sense...unless the economy is an a sort of death spiral where companies layoff employees, then stock goes, then companies layoff more, then stock goes up, so on and so forth.
Ouroboros. The economy is eating its own tail.
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