[frenchie4111]

I found this part interesting: "Inference requests from the agent never leave the sandbox directly. OpenShell intercepts every call and routes it to the NVIDIA cloud provider."

Seems like they are doing this to become the default compute provider for the easiest way to set up OpenClaw. If it works out, it could drive a decent amount of consumer inference revenue their way

[cactusplant7374]

Secure installation isn't the main problem with OpenClaw. This project doesn't seem to be solving a real problem. Of course the real problem is giving an LLM access to everything and hoping for the best.

[blizdiddy]

Running OpenClaw is the nerd equivalent of rolling coal

[PurpleRamen]

OpenClaw can be useful, in theory, unlike rolling coal. OpenClaw is what people always hoped Siri, Alexa and/or Google Assistant would be, and now it's really here. It may be expensive, has a chance to become your local Skynet and might randomly delete or leak everything that's valuable for you..but I guess this counts as growing pains.

[recursive]

Rolling coal can be useful in theory, for pissing people off. As intended.

[jsolson]

I'm trying to put together what you could possibly mean by this -- rolling coal is fundamentally about spite. In isolation, nobody _wants_ their vehicle to spew black smoke. It only comes close to making sense in the context of another population (EV owners, typically, or more generally "the libs").

OpenClaw lets people live a bit dangerously, but fundamentally gives them something that they actually wanted. They wanted it so badly that they're willing to take what seem like insane risks to get it.

What do the two have in common?

[bigfishrunning]

> OpenClaw lets people live a bit dangerously, but fundamentally gives them something that they actually wanted. They wanted it so badly that they're willing to take what seem like insane risks to get it.

For the first time in my career I feel so incredibly behind on this: What is open claw giving people that they want so badly? It just seems like Russian Roulette, I honestly don't see the upside

[ttsalami]

I can give you, as an example, what is driving me towards trying it.

I work as a contractor for 2 companies, not out of necessity, but greed. I also have a personal project with a friend that is dangerously close to becoming a business that needs attention. I also have other responsibilities and believe it or not - friends. Also the ADHD on top of that.

I yearn for a personal assistant. Something or somebody that will read the latest ticket assigned to me, the email with project feedback, the message from my best friend that I haven't replied for the last 3 days and remind me: "you should do this, it's going to take 5 minutes", "you have to do this today, because tomorrow you are swamped" or "you should probably start X by doing Y".

I have tried so many systems of managing my schedule and I can never stick with it. I have a feeling that having a bot "reach out", but also be able to do "reasoning" over my pending things would be a game changer.

But yes, the russian roulette part is holding me back. I am taking suggestions though

[heavyset_go]

You will learn to ignore the bot like everything else.

You're looking for a technical solution to a problem that is not technical. Saying this as someone who is similar to you.

[sigbottle]

How much would a real personal assistant cost?

[rune-dev]

But isn’t this just another notification to ignore?

The ticket being assigned to you is your “Hey take care of this!” ping, same with the email or text from your friend.

How long until you start tuning out the openclaw notifications?

[BeetleB]

Like with any new tool/technology, you have to try it. And even then the benefits won't be obvious to you until you've played with it for a few days/weeks. With LLMs in general, it took me months before I found real good use cases.

Simple example: I tell (with my voice) my OpenClaw instance to monitor a given web site daily and ping me whenever a key piece of information shows up there.

The real problem is that it is fairly unreliable. It would often ping me even when the information had not shown up.

Another example: I'm particular about the weather related information I want, and so far have not found any app that has everything. I got sick of going to a particular web site, clicking on things, to get this information. So I created a Skill to get what I need, and now I just ask for it (verbally), and I get it.

As the GP said. This is what Siri etc should have been.

[bigfishrunning]

> Simple example: I tell (with my voice) my OpenClaw instance to monitor a given web site daily and ping me whenever a key piece of information shows up there.

Maybe i'm just old -- a cron job can fetch the info and push it to some notification service too, without also being a chaos agent. It seems I spend the security cost here, and in return i can save 15 minutes writing a script. Juice doesn't seem to be worth the squeeze.

[Kye]

It increasingly seems like most people make a different decision after thinking through the security implications of something like this. This is me being charitable.

[phil21]

A personal assistant of some sort that is actually useful at some stuff and not just a toy?

It’s not some huge life changing thing for me, but I also only dabble with it - certainly it has no access to anything very important to my life.

I find it incredibly useful to just have a chat line open with a little agent running on a tiny computer on my IoT network at home I can ask to do basic chores.

Last night I realized I forgot to set the permanent holiday lights to “obnoxious st parties day animation” at around 9pm. It was basically the effect of “hey siri, please talk to the front house wled controller and set an appropriate very colorful theme for the current holiday until morning” while I drove to pick my wife up from a friends house.

Without such a quick off-handed ability to get that done, there was zero chance I was coming home 20 minutes later, remembering I should do that, spending 10 minutes googling an appropriate preset lighting theme someone already came up with, grabbing laptop, and clicking a half dozen buttons to get that done.

Trivial use case? Yup. But those trivial things add up for a measurable quality of life difference to me.

I’m sure there are better and cleaner ways to achieve similar - but it’s a very fast on-ramp into getting something from zero to useful without needing to learn all this stuff from the ground up. Every time I think of something around that complexity level I go “ugh. I’ll get to it at some point” but if I spend 15 minutes with openclaw I can usually have a decent tool that is “good enough” for future use to get related things done for the future.

It’s done far more complex development/devops “lab” stuff for me that at least proved some concepts for work later. I’ll throw away the output, but these are items that would have been put off indefinitely due to activation energy because the basics are trivial but annoyingly time consuming. Spin up a few VMs, configure basic networking, install and configure the few open source tools I wanted to test out, create some simple glue code to mock out what I wanted to try out. That sort of thing. Basically stuff I would have a personal intern do if I could afford one.

For now it’s basically doing my IT chores for me. The other night I had it finally get around to setting up some dashboards and Prometheus monitoring for some various sensors and WiFi stuff around the house. Useful when I need it, but not something I ever got around to doing myself for the past 7 years since I moved in. Knocking out that todo list is pretty nice!

The risk is pretty moderate for me. Worst case it deletes configs or bricks something it has access to and I need to roll back from backups it does not have permissions to even know exist, much less modify. It certainly has zero access to personal email, real production environments, or anything like that.

[hadlock]

OpenClaw has a persistent memory, stored to disk, and an efficient way of accessing it. ChatGPT and Claude both added a rudimentary "memory" feature in March but it's nowhwere as extensible or vendor neutral.

[KeplerBoy]

ChatGPT had memory for a long time. Claude also had it for quite some time for paying customers.

[sam-cop-vimes]

It is possible that they don't understand the risks involved, but yes, it certainly is tapping into unmet need.

[frantathefranta]

> In isolation, nobody _wants_ their vehicle to spew black smoke.

Honestly, when I was 12 years old and my dad floored the TDi in our Land Rover (with the diesel particulate filter deleted), it felt satisfying in a way, like the machine is allowed to be its most efficient self.

Now that I'm adult, I know that it's marginal gains for the car and terrible for the environment, but there are people that have the thinking capability of a 12 year old driving these trucks. I don't think all of them do it because of spite (though I'm sure most do).

[croes]

And don’t care about them but they endanger third parties too.

And many of them are people who should know better.

Let’s make them 100% liable

[SkyeCA]

It might be about spite for some, but it's okay to admit you don't understand car people, especially the ones who like diesels.

[Iolaum]

While I don't have OpenClaw installed and not sure how I 'd use it I doubt all the hype around it is because it doesn't solve a real problem. The project grew to huge popularity organically!!!

How can that happen if it doesn't serve a need people have?

[eru]

Compare NFTs. For them, it depends a bit on whether you see scratching a gambling itch as a real problem.

[tryauuum]

people are trying to run as fast as they can so that they are not left behind

(I've never run openclaw but planning)

[angry_octet]

Driving without seatbelts while drunk is actually quite popular too.

[g947o]

Maybe let me ask this question:

How is this any different from NFT?

[SkyBelow]

NFTs were fueled by two different drives. One interested in the technology and if it could do something new and interesting, and another seeing it as an area of speculation (be that fueled by get rich quick and cash out or thinking it is a long term investment generally driven by how much the first factor played in).

OpenClaw seems to lack the monetary interest driving it as much. Not to say there is none, but I don't see people doing nearly as much to get me to buy their OpenClaw.

So, yes, on some level, hype alone doesn't prove use, because it can also be because of making money. But, on the other hand, the specific version of hype seems much more focused on the "Look at what I built" and much less on "Better buy in now" from the builders themselves. Of course the API providers selling tokens are loving it for financial reasons.

[PurpleRamen]

NFTs can't delete your mails.

[CamperBob2]

"And that's why we've created MailCoin, the best way to perform stochastic mailbox ablation with with the latest, hottest blockchain technology." - from Show HN, March 20, 2026

[ElFitz]

Now with NFTs and pixel art, memorialising each and every one of your deleted emails in a unique and non-fungible way.

…

…

Now I actually want to make it, and build a "card trading game" on top of it.

[danielbln]

I'll ignore the bait and answer: NFTs were gambling in disguise, these claws are personal/household assistants, that proactively perform various tasks and can be genuinely useful. The security problem is very much unsolved, but comparing them to NFTs is just willfully ignorant at best

[amelius]

s/revenue/data/

[cat-turner]

yes. this is it. but the average consumer isn't going to use this.

Google is just going to do its version and win again. Everyone uses google.