Tech companies are less receptive to alcohol than they used to be. There was a post (can't find it now) from a VC firm saying something like, "We encourage our companies to throw no alcohol parties; there's less risk of all kinds, and overall it's less messy."

After MeToo it was all gone. A lot of the incidents that were problematic from that era almost all had some alcohol involved.

I hear people say this, but I also see announcements from Chinese carmakers like this:

"NEW: Latest EV model boasts full charge (200 miles) in only ~5 minutes"

To me, that seems like a leaps & bounds improvement.

I was using cruise control on the highway yesterday and thinking: this is like very cheap very crude self-driving. And you know what? In its limited UNIX-like way, it's great: the car does a much better job of gradually injecting fuel than I, with my brick-like human foot, can do. Robot 1, human 0.

And from there it's easy to think: couldn't the car also detect white lines and stay within them? It doesn't have to be perfect; it can be cruise control++. If it errs a little, I can save it. But otherwise, this is a function I'd love to use if it was available, for a sub $1000 price point.

I think of Tesla autopilot as sophisticated cruise control. Can perform most driving tasks better than I can, saves a lot of cognitive work, still needs close of my 100% attention.

Is this comment from 2010? Maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems you would be shocked by what modern cars are capable of.

The intention of my comment (possibly unclear) was to say: I know we can do self-driving very well very expensively. But what can we do extremely cheaply?

Like the difference between "what can do we with an LLM on my maxxed-out laptop with an RTX 5090 card" vs. "what can we do with a mac mini." Self-driving car version.

This post has convinced me to give Mastodon another try.

This is me w Google Gemini. And you're right: it does change your outlook on micropayments, which in my case, are API calls. My costs for the last few days: 3 cents, 2 cents, 46 cents. Believe it or not, every one of those calls was scrutinized and justified.

This is my take.

First: the audience is NOT software devs. Because as you've surely noticed if you are a software dev, you can do most of the things that OpenClaw can do; if it offers improvements, they seem very marginal. You know, "it makes web apps" I can do that; "it posts to Discord programmatically" I can code that; etc. Maybe an AI code buddy shaves a few minutes off but so what. It's hard to understand the hoopla if this is you.

However, if you're a small business owner of some kind, where "small business" is defined by headcount (not valuation - this can include VC's), it's been transformative.

For a person like that, adding a 10k/mo expense is a natural move. And, at that price point, an AI service for 2k/mo is more than competitive: it's a savings.

The other part is that I think a lot of people have gotten used to human-in-the-loop workflows, but there's a big step up if you can omit the person.

Combining this w/the observation above, there were a lot of small business owners who were probably stymied by this problem: they had a bunch of tasks across departments that were worth like $2k/mo to do but couldn't fill (not enough in salary, couldn't be local). AI fits naturally for that use case. For them, it's valuable.

I see your point but these business owners are going to wait until a big player offers this as an online service. As of now installing *Claw requires running scripts, mucking about with Docker etc, no business owner is going to do that unless software dev happens to be their hobby.

I think in a hand-wavey sense people understand that $PROFIT means $INCOME here.

We should be friends. I got 47. In my defense, I was tired.

I was the first to post my score and I thought I did pretty well. Pure hubris! Looking forward to brunch (/j, I'm pretty far away).

This was true when Tesla was primarily in the market of making electric cars. It is not true if their business is humanoid robots: that's squarely meme stock territory.

This article is just a slightly upscale version of the million "YouTube hooks" videos you can find on, well, you know. Down to the "create a gap" advice.

Once upon a time "one weird trick" was good advice too, before it got ran into the ground.

In this era, it takes credibility to grab my attention before I even care about your promise of benefits.

It’s not “make me care.” It’s “make me believe and care, every step of the way.”