Jukka NiiranenFeb 25

@jkmcnk @patrick_h_lauke @hiiaminfi @tante "Physical security matters. The Mac is in my office, which is in my house. If someone steals it, I have bigger problems."

2 weeks later: "Behold! I have connected #OpenClaw with the smart home system that can open the door to my house!!!"

https://www.omarknows.ai/p/lobster-gets-a-playbook-and-a-superpower

Lobster Gets a Playbook (and a Superpower) 🦞🏠

I really really cannot express how useful Lobster is to me

OmarKnows AI
Show threadSarianna Silvonen
@jukkan @jkmcnk @patrick_h_lauke @hiiaminfi @tante
Not exactly security-related, but I can't help wondering... why don't these family members just *talk* to each other about their movie plans or travel memories? Why doesn't this guy just pop upstairs and peek into his kid's room to see if he's asleep, like a normal person? (Tangentially, why does a Microsoft VP use an exclusively Apple-based setup for his personal computing?) This seems to me like an overly technologically fetishized way to conduct one's private life. But then I'm not a tech VP, what would I know 🤷‍♀️
Feb 25 at 2:11pmWeb
Show threadtanteFeb 25
@ssilvonen @jukkan @jkmcnk @patrick_h_lauke @hiiaminfi Because dudes in tech rather talk to a chatbot than their family or a therapist.
Show threadSarianna SilvonenFeb 25
@tante @jukkan @jkmcnk @patrick_h_lauke @hiiaminfi
Yes, this case certainly makes that painfully obvious.
Show threadPatrick H. LaukeFeb 25
@ssilvonen @tante @jukkan @jkmcnk @hiiaminfi in fairness, as a father of a stroppy teenager myself, i admit that i do often end up just communicating with him upstairs via whatsapp. however...it's still me doing it. what this agentic thing does is to make "speak with the actual person to check/coordinate things" into a step for the machine to do, as part of a larger process. i can understand why, but it doesn't make it any less dehumanising and odd...
Show threadSarianna SilvonenFeb 25
@patrick_h_lauke @tante @jukkan @jkmcnk @hiiaminfi Well yeah, any way you can get your teenager to communicate counts as a plus! What strikes me as mechanized here is using "Lobster" to relay messages between family members when they could just as easily chat directly with each other. The use of an agentic AI assistant to organize your calendar and travel plans etc. seems to me a more natural and helpful use case (security issues aside), where the "communication" is just between one person and the AI.
Show threadCassandrichFeb 25

@patrick_h_lauke @ssilvonen @tante @jukkan @jkmcnk @hiiaminfi There's nothing wrong with communicating with someone over their preferred channel. It being WhatsApp (ick Facebook but whatever, that's not the point here) doesn't make it any less communicating than using a normal phone call or text or shouting across the house.

What is gross is putting an extractive capitalist business in the middle as the mediator of that communication so you never actually get to communicate with each other.

Show threadPhDog2d ago

Practically the point of technology for them, as far as I can tell.

@tante @ssilvonen @jukkan @jkmcnk @patrick_h_lauke @hiiaminfi

Show threadJoe BrockmeierFeb 25

@ssilvonen I have no shade to throw at families using a family calendar; when my kids were in high school and my wife and I still traveled for work occasionally, etc. it was the only way to have a source of truth that people could rely on. It was especially helpful to tell the teenagers "if it's not on the calendar, I don't know about it" to avoid those "oh, but you were supposed to drive me to $thing, didn't I tell you? Oh, well, I really need a ride now." And so on.

I don't advocate for putting an LLM in the middle of all that, of course, but there is much to be said for putting family plans on a shared calendar and making it an expectation that every member checks said calendar. It doesn't replace conversation and such, but it sure can cut down on a lot of problems.

@jukkan @jkmcnk @patrick_h_lauke @hiiaminfi @tante

Show threadSarianna SilvonenFeb 26
@jzb Oh yes, family calendars can be very useful, and printed ones have been around long before computers (we actually have one hanging in our kitchen right now). It's just the use of AI to mediate between family members using the same calendar that feels unnecessary and contrived to me. But of course this is a new development and this guy is clearly very excited about his current setup - it would be interesting to know if he can actually make it stick and how things are going a year from now.