_{meme courtesy of} @DarthCoin

IF you have a beating heart (or otherwise) and use the internet nowadays for anything besides doomscrolling on socials (I know, we are the diminishing remnant, aren't we?);

AND IF

you are reading this on SN, are invested in some capacity in bitcoin and care about data privacy;

AND EVEN IF

you are not a technical wizard, but care about, follow along with the and try technologies as they emerge and you don't consider yourself to be a luddite;

THEN,

you have most likely toyed with employing--or, at the very least, the idea of doing so--an Openclaw agent to help you automate some things in your life, or wondered whether such a thing would be prudent or wise, our outright rejected the idea as a security/privacy abomination;

OR

you have simply just said to yourself WTF is going on in internet-land?? I hope all this settles and we can get things back to the way they were.

Well, I have...

ClawnkersClawnkers

_another @DarthCoin _banger

The proprietor of this territory announced yesterday (#1430258), due to an influx of ai generated content, that the posting fees will be temporarily increased to stop-gap the undesirable phenomenon of our beautiful SN garden being plagued by clawnkers (a great term, btw).

Previously, some bots had been able to circumvent the authentication methods used to get on to SN and vigilante down-zappers had been able to stem in their influx; in the last few weeks a new phenomenon has occurred making these weeds all the more unruly.

Clawdbot is an agenic AI software that can run on your local server, which you can talk to like a person via whatsapp or other channels, and make it do almost anything you are able to do on that machine. It has been discussed at length during the last few episodes of SNL (and is explained here #1422957) and so if you are unsure of what I am referring to, then I urge you to figure out what it is before you finish reading.

[Insert Darthcoin Meme here][Insert Darthcoin Meme here]

Now, as I have written about before, I am not a very technically savvy person. I only first started to find my way around linux when I got into learning about bitcoin a few years back. My profession, admittedly, has little to nothing to do with this technology. I heard the siren (lobster?) song while listening to Marty and Matt banter about using ai agents to trade on LN markets. Guy Swann, another prominent bitcoin podcaster, bragged about having set one up. OK, thought I, I know my way around a linux server too--let's try and figure out if this can be useful to me.

Thus, I dove into the proverbial rabbit hole only to emerge disheveled and unshaven 48-hours later (I even lost my cowboy hat for it).

What I was able to accomplish:What I was able to accomplish:

• calendar automation: tell Louis (named after the rebellious Louis Riel) my calendar event, or even show him a document with this info, and he logs these into google calendar.
• Basic bookkeeping: send Louis photos of receipts/invoices, which he then reads, transcribed and sorts chronologically in an excel spreadsheet.
• Daily cron jobs: perform a deep research on so-and-so topic and send me the result every day at the same time, tell me the weather, remind me call so-and-so at such-and-such time ... yadda-yadda-yadda.

Some considerations of noteSome considerations of note

• Openclaw has access to your computer at the user-level by default. On a siloed machine without sudo privileges, it seems to behave, but it did ask me to grant it elevated permission a few times. It can go through all the files you stored locally. I'm guessing if you use good encryption practices, your secrets are safe, but I do not know this for certain.
• Openclaw probably shouldn't go near any of your bitcoin tech, unless you have explicit guardrails to rein in collateral damage. This seems like a given.
• Openclaw runs locally, but requires an LLM API key to work. In other words, you need it to pull from an AI model (Gemini, Claude, OpenAI etc...). In most cases, you need a paid plan to get this. Google seems generous with trial credits. ANY data given it will be siphoned off into whatever model you are using.
• Clawhub (beware, is probably filled with malware), a clawnker skill public registry, has some useful skills like making your bot able to debug and even improve itself autonomously. These bots can even make their own skills, so expect this landscape to continue to evolve rapidly.

Has it been worth it?Has it been worth it?

Some say you can hear lobsters scream when you put them into a vat of boiling water. With openclaw, we may submerge ourselves with just a whisper.

Well, I spent a considerable number of tokens (in the area of $150 of said Google credits) and time trying to coerce the damn thing to debug itself. On net, has it really saved me any time? Negative. Quite the opposite, I figure I've spent more time toying with it than being productive. With continued use, I would expect I can continue to finagle it to do some of the more menial, every-day tasks and only trivially simplify my life.

There are obviously many more things to consider, as illuminated by @optimism's comment and the ensuing discussion in the yesterday's saloon (#1430611).

As a Bitcoiner, Should I Care?

I think it was @bitcoinplebdev that made a comment about how Bitcoiners ought not to be luddites. I quite agree, and it is this sentiment that prompted me to get on and give it a try. However, piping AI data centres directly into your home machines should be anathema to the cypher punk ethos. Can these poles be bridged?

As a wise person once told me:

Not trying facebook would have saved a lot of entries in Palantir's datalakes, though. Currently it works against you if you're a Palestinian in Gaza or a Somali in MN... but not being targeted yet doesn't mean there is no future case against you.