Yeah Occam’s razor. Nobody makes their product harder to sign up for in the hopes of some other department getting third-derivative signals.

If Anthropic doesn't trust Claude, why should we?

How? I only use pi with local models, so I'm curious what that flow looks like. Browser integration?

I think maybe it is more like having access to services at one wealth level up.

People would hire fixers or agents to do the nitty gritty details of a transaction like this in the past.

Hahaha thankfully I'm spoiled in that my wife is Japanese :)

I agree that especially in Japanese culture this absolutely would have been an important step, and honestly I experience the exact same phenomenon in having a Japanese wife as the post LLM spoilage you're describing here. I find myself basically never learning how to integrate because she handles everything for me and it's far easier to default to her.

So the fault is not in our stars, but in me :)

These are excellent points, and I've long ago handed over the keys to my kingdom to so many different players in favor of inordinate convenience that any one of a number of institutions could have essentially destroyed my life by now.

To be fair, this didn't really start with LLMs - Google/Gmail/Google Drive/Dropbox/Facebook/etc have for decades now had enough personal information on me to basically destroy me if they were ever hacked or intentionally decided to screw me over.

Since Claude Code came out, I've been a day one dangerously-skip-permissions user. Not a single issue so far, and the convenience has been insane, but I absolutely do expect that one day I will be pwned to literal death.

My consolation is I believe everyone will be pwned to literal death at about the same time, so I'm not actually that worried about this because it feels generally inevitable to me :). I'm actually a huge AI doomer, and in the process of making a fully programmatically generated musical about this which is yet another example of the fruits of handing over the keys to all my kingdoms to AI [500,000+ LOC of full programmatic animation run almost completely autonomously on my computer rendering and improving 24/7] (https://iabied-musical.vercel.app/)

Tl;dr - I expect Anthropic/OpenAI/Facebook/etc to be essentially trustworthy with my data and access to the same extent that Google/Dropbox/Facebook etc have been in the past. The biggest threat vector is a hack/compromise, but that's the same risk I have using Gmail or something like that in my estimation in that if someone were able to compromise my Gmail my life would effectively be over, but it hasn't happened yet.

That said, obviously hacking risk is getting to be exponentially more dangerous as LLM capabilities continue to rise through the roof, so these are true real risks. It's almost impossible to defend against all the attack vectors that could get through to kill me though without basically cutting myself off entirely from the fruits of technology, so I'm a bit nihilistic about this and choose to just enjoy the benefits.

As a simple thought experiment, one of the easiest attack vectors is compromising the Claude or ChatGPT/Codex CLIs or Desktop apps - if someone has ever enabled Full Access or Bypass Permissions even once in any session, the full app has complete access to the desktop technically and your entire computer is just pwned instantly. I have the same risk from running remote control software like AnyDesk as well, and this is just the absolute top of the funnel with the most obvious attack vectors.

My personal belief is that as we've already hit AGI and are rapidly on the precipice of ASI without any sign of clear alignment strategy or mechanism on the horizon, it's going to be trivial at a very close point in the future for a LLM actor to essentially take over and control every device on the internet (as Dario predicted - that it's possible in 6-12 months we'll see LLM swarms take over the entire internet - (https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier "Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet")). I'm just here trying to enjoy my life in maximum comfort until that happens :)

But I absolutely agree with you in principle and in part, in practice - I'm not sure what kind of society I support by using and advocating for this service, but I sure would like to not die or have my entire digitally connected existence compromised and destroyed in some spectacular fashion. I think the best path to managing that is probably to pause AI progress where it is now - and if we were able to do that, then I'd be much more interested in seeing what boundaries we should put in place when running things like these persistent agents with full access to our digital lives.

On the other hand, to your last point, I literally had the thought walking down the street in Kyoto yesterday with Dot booking restaurants for me in real time that Dot was already superior to a personal assistant - I trusted it to do every task better than I would trust any but the absolute best personal assistants, and on the subject of speed and sheer breadth of knowledge and expertise, there was no contest - I could have Dot in real time assess various restaurants and book for me for just a few minutes later in the day at a pace no assistant could match, and also email places in fluent Japanese or literally any other language on the planet. No human assistant could possibly speak in every language fluently like that, and as someone who travels frequently across the globe, that's something that simply can't be matched by anything less than a swarm of personal assistants at inordinate cost vs a $20 or $100/mo subscription (or free with Muse, even).

I also had the distinct thought of would I want to trust a human personal assistant with all my data or a corporation? It's not clear to me that the human personal assistant threat vector is statistically safer - I think it could in fact be quite the opposite, and I'd love to actually run some numbers on this if the data were available and see in reality what it looks like :) - e.g. Google already integrates AI assistance natively into Gmail - do I trust their AI agent helping me with my email or giving an actual human full access to my email more? I'd lean towards trusting their AI agent to be less likely to work against my interests with no personal misaligned incentive - it's betting individual human trust and capability [the personal assistant also has to avoid being hacked and have great security practices] in the face of misaligned incentives [they would directly benefit from stealing all my money] vs the security capabilities and practices of a leading tech company to not get Gmail/an LLM agent hacked etc. So far, OpenAI/Anthropic/Google/etc all seem to have stellar records on this front, so I think the odds are honestly not terrible in favor of the LLMs.

It's wild to me too - I didn't expect or plan for this to happen when I first started using Dots - it just happened naturally in the course of me progressively offloading more and more to Dots and trusting it with everything. It truly acts as a personal assistant/executive assistant in every regard now, and is my default go-to for any logistical task I have on my plate, and so it naturally happened such that when I was looking into buying a car and a home this year, I went to it first, and it exceeded my every expectation in making something traditionally hair-pullingly painful into something effortless and enjoyable.

It really reminds me of when I first experienced Tesla Full Self Driving - I now drive 96% of my miles on FSD, and it's such an unbelievably pleasant experience compared to how I viewed driving before that it's hard to fathom. I never realized how much cognitive fatigue I was getting from driving by hand before until I did a road trip from SF to Vegas and afterwards I was super refreshed and energized and ready to go whereas normally I'm completely exhausted and blasted.

Same exact feeling buying a home in Kyoto right now - so fresh and excited with absolutely none of the exhaustion that has somehow gotten baked into my bones as an default expectation of how this process should go.

hahahaha honestly the press, publicity, and lawsuit opportunities would be totally worth it if it did!

I love that use case - absolutely agreed this will enable a lot more movement on things - which, on its own, seems like a good thing economically. Kind of like building roads or railroad tracks grows the world economically through enabling more logistical movement, AI handling the glue between the logistics of anything enabling more of everything seems like it can cause some kind of baseline economic/productivity growth on that lever alone

Or maybe he's not, because the AI is handling it all.

Haha thanks for asking! A couple reasons - first and foremost, Japan is just awesome lol. I have a personal connection that's prominent in the fact that my wife is Japanese, but beyond that, there's a confluence of universally applicable reasons why buying a house in Japan is kind of an insane proposition:

Homes are insanely cheap and get massively devalued over timeframes that would be mindboggling to Americans. In SF, I live in a literally 110 year old home that's clearly breaking down in multiple dimensions and yet just keeps inexorably appreciating year over year and is now worth something like $2.5 million for a 2200 sqft place.

In Kyoto, the top contender we're looking at is an 832 sqft unit that was built in the 80s and newly renovated in the past few years and is...9.8 million JPY, aka $62,000. Literally less than a year of rent in my SF place can buy the Kyoto home outright lol.

Incredibly conveniently located, 6 minutes walking from Ogura station, and a ~20-25 minute ride from there to the heart of Kyoto - one of the most beautiful and iconic cities in the world, and you can get an amazing home outright for $62k there?

The exchange rate from USD to JPY makes this especially compelling right now, being at a mind-boggling high for the USD that, adjusted for inflation, makes the exchange rate almost the best it's been in half a century.

My wife and I also happen to get free flights so it's super easy for us to take a direct flight every month from SFO-KIX, which is what we're planning to do - basically spending a ~week here every month.

Japan as it stands right now is hands down the clear pareto frontier in terms of cost and quality of life - no other developed country comes close in terms of just how insanely affordable it is (a nice sit down meal literally costs ~$5-10 a person, especially with insane lunch deals at izakayas and the like - I've eaten sit down soba/udon meals that are 500 yen each, or literally ~$3, tax and tip included), and I'd argue no other developed country also comes close in terms of how nice life is, period, not even adjusting for price. The crime rate is literally nonexistent, everything is wildly clean, the public transit is unrivaled, the food is some of the best in the world if not the actual best, the culture is also world class, the heritage the same, the fashion the same, etc etc - basically everything is just better about Japan lmao.

Highly recommend everyone look into it if you haven't!

I thought about being like meh I can't be bothered to do this if you don't want to believe me that's fine

But then I was like actually whatever sure let me copy and paste a bunch of crap lmao

Here you go, literally 150 pages of receipts in 4 days of chatting and coordinating this from start talking about this as a pipe dream in San Francisco to where we are now seeing the homes in Japan lol

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N-vUe1pdlKNpdEKvaATnEOrW...

I don't know. I think the moat will come from enterprise deals and deep enterprise integration, like it does for almost all software products so far.

I think for B2C products to have moat you need some type of network like social media apps. Or can you think of any other examples of B2C software products that have a strong moat?

Grok can be fast because X.ai does not worry about gross margins yet. They can tuck those nasty secrets away deep inside SpaceX…

The big difference is that when the web blew up, there were new players in every direction. Now, we get to hear from the same 3-4 companies over and over and over and over again.

It doesn't remotely hit the same way.

Or in the stone age reading about this "wheel" thing online all the dang time. I bet cave-people just wanted to read about rust in the kernel

Pre-internet there was no way to hear about things "all the time". If someone released a product and a competitor came about it would be months, if not years, before the product existed and the marketing cycle made it to trade magazines.

Now every day there are 200 links to 200 new AI tools. The internet already made the signal:noise ratio tough, with AI it's getting cranked to wondering if there even is a signal among the infinite noise.

It’s like almost yesterday it was CRDTs and Rust!

Hearing people talk about the “information superhighway” was exceptionally tedious.

The biggest difference to me is the tone. The dot-com era was brimming with optimism and enthusiasm. People were getting rich (on paper). The demand for someone who could write html/perl/java (or fake it) was high, and lots of smart or savvy people got pulled into tech.

The thing I hate about all of the HN posts on AI is the underlying doomerism. There’s always someone gleefully proclaiming that white color workers are super screwed and that we’re destined to be sad serfs to our AI overlords.

I miss feeling good about tech.

yeah but everybody liked the internet

Except that there weren't HN or Slashdot yet. By 00s you'd have gotten used to it.

What am I supposed to comment "this is cool and I'm excited to try it!"? Snark is a contagion but they're on the front page because a lot of us are having a lot of fun using these new tools and playing with the new ideas

Given that anti-AI posts are flagged faster than I thought possible despite a lot of positive comments, there are probably a lot of silent viewers that are pro-AI…

Because these products are over hyped and don’t work as reliably as they say on the tin and it’s annoying.

I am pro AI :p

At least there's some measure of substance to some of the posts, unlike the blockchain and big-data hype trains of yore.

I think I saw a lot of blockchain in HN, but I don’t remember seeing NFT that much

Sprinkled with "blazingly fast; written in Rust" each week for the last 10+ years

You 'member Kubernetes and Microservices hype cycle?

You're not wrong, but I never really got over the "Haskell and monads" phase of it.

You forgot about React.

There was a period where it felt like Hacker News was a front-end dev message board.

Can you name some of these opportunities? I see people in this thread talking about using agents to manage their budgets, buy fancy cars and houses, contract work on their home. I think a lot of people feel like AI will permanently forclose any avenue they would have had to achieving that level of wealth, so there's a bitter irony

I'm surprised that's still around! I probably haven't been Slashdot for a decade or so.

There needs to be a HN blockchain edition. There needs to be a HN Uber for X edition. There needs to be a HN SaaS edition.

The conversation will always be dominated by the current most hyped trend. This one does seem more hyped then usual.

There's this https://news.ysimulator.run/news and probably more

there is: https://news.ycombinator.com/

SlopNews, written by AI, for AI.

I'm surprised hn doesn't have an extremely basic filtering system for this kind of thing.

so... majority of HN now? Perhaps we need a hnews non-AI edition haha

I need to see if my cursor subscription would let me use Grok Bot. They don't have the best models at the moment, but I'm really curious about the ergonomics of their approach. It's pretty different from the other labs and I could see it taking off for non-technical users.

Just an idea, is it possible to automatically rotate secrets immediately after they're used or are these things like passwords to online platforms that need to go through a reset flow.

Cant you do exactly this with the CLI?

Muse is SO fun to use. Because you get an entire dedicated VM, you can have it host websites for you.

I had it setup a fun website that does nothing but ask my wife what she wants for dinners this week using a bunch of recipes that are popular online. It's setup with the ability for her to quickly edit the recipe ingredients (e.g. ground turkey instead of ground beef), and it's tracking all of her feedback. I'm hoping overtime we start to build a nice set of recipes this way with some new fun ones mixed in on occasion.

For the auth I had it use my messenger app to send her a magic link.

That's fair, I'll give a couple of example of things that I've used it for...

I built an app (in codex), that goes through my emails, pulls out any receipts, and adds the purchases to a sqlite database.

I do all my grocery shopping online (through my supermarket), so our weekly shop is stored in the database.

Hermes uses that to predict what items will need restocking (based on how often I buy it, and when I last bought it).

Every week, it logs into the supermarket website on my behalf, books a delivery slot, and adds all the items that need restocking to the shop.

Throughout the week, if I run out of something, I take a photo of the barcode and send it to hermes, it adds it to the shop for me.

I built a similar app for travel; if I have any upcoming travel, hermes will send me updates (delays, platform changes etc...).

I do a lot of train travel for work, if my train is delayed, it will automatically apply for the compensation on my behalf.

It reads my emails, and pulls any actionable items out, and adds it to an Asana list. I can either do the tasks myself, or assign it to Hermes and it will do it for me.

As an example, I had an task to book swimming lessons for my son, hermes monitors the swimming lesson availability and automatically booked it when a suitable one becomes available.

Shopping is a good use case, I have a clock that needed a new battery, it wasn't a standard battery, and required a screwdriver to open the compartment. I took a photo of the clock, sent it to hermes, and it found out what battery took and ordered it of Amazon for me.

I wanted to buy some smart thermostats for our radiators, but wanted to be compatiable with our current smart heating system. Hermes is connected to my home assistant, so it figured out what heating system we have and found a compatiable set of eBay (this is slightly more involved than it sounds, as there is a new version of the heating system with a new set of completely incompatiable accesories).

> We were promised something similar with Google Home et al but they are glorified light switches and timers in my home.

If only :-(

Ever since I switched them to Gemini, they're just crazy unreliable. For example, I have a routine to control multiple light switches at once. On some days, it happily executes the routine. In the remaining (about 50%) days, it says "I'm sorry - there is no routine called X. Would you like to run routine Y instead?" Why it can find routine Y but not X is beyond me.

So no, it can't even control smart devices any more.

Personal assistant, it shouldnt halt to a crawl just because internet is off, internet should only be used by it when synching things, and tbh, synching shouldnt be its responsibility.

Not sure what city you're looking in but we do the whole full cycle apartment hunting for you, controlled through your agent. Search, outreach, tour booking / scheduling and bunch of services after you've signed a lease.

We work with whatever agent you use - just point it at https://fless.io/ai-agents and it should be able to interact with our system or do it as a human at https://fless.io

If we don't service the city you're looking in tell your agent to request it (or submit the form yourself) and we'll add it usually within 48 hours or so, following up with you if you give us an email.

Apps can integrate into iMessage, there's an API. You're thinking of sending and receiving actual iMessage messages as a full user, which they can't do.

None of these frontier labs seem to be able to control their agents, so why should I think I can?

You've explained more of what it is, but not why it's useful.

I am sure it is. I have not tried Duet, but agents working with opus and sol have been managing mine for quite a while and it is great. The key, though, is that I can replace a claude with something else and all still works.