Pointing to agriculture as a necessity while also wanting water usage to be "productive" is a little contradictory here. We grow things because there is a demand for those products in similar way that there is a demand for datacenters, the nutrition aspect is secondary and has been for a long time now. Would you say that almond growing is a productive use of our water? How about bananas, or beef, or avocados? All of these products use an abnormally large amount of water compared to other agricultural endeavors and if we compare that to data center water usage data center's are a drop in the bucket. We don't 'need' all of products we produce through agriculture to survive anymore, we grow them because we like them.
From a conceptual perspective it sounds great. The problem is that OpenClaw isn't actually a solution to that problem for 2 reasons, user expectation and underlying security. The majority of people I've talked to who want an 'AI assistant' effectively are expecting a proper executive assistant, just in AI form. A proper executive assistant will remember every important bit you tell them, they won't need to be reminded of it later, and more importantly they come to me of their own volition when something comes up. All things OpenClaw does not solve. Further, using MCP as the underlying protocol means you have to implicitly trust every piece of data you connect to that AI, because otherwise it's way too easy for me to send you an email with hidden instructions just for your AI to read. I mean even the defaults for the OpenClaw install had basically opened everyone who installed it and didn't configure it in any way to any attacker. So while I agree with you that there are problems in this space that an AI agent 'could' solve, OpenClaw does not currently solve any of them, and in fact does the opposite, exposing you and all your information easily.
It took me a reread and some thinking to realize what was going on. The 'MCP app' he's referring to here is basically a browser front-end replacement like electron. So what he's doing here is running DOOM as apart of that browser run-time and passing it through to the front-end. It's less "playing DOOM through the AI" and more "Playing DOOM while the AI can watch".
Thank you for this explanation. So the AI can respond based on the DOOM game that it’s watching? E.g. Could you ask the chatbot for advice on what to do next on the current game level?
Kind of? Even watching is probably a bit of a stretch here. The point of an MCP server is to be a sort of AI translator for whatever you're inputting. Here we're inputting an iframe that's running a wasm binary. So I imagine in theory all the AI sees is the actual iframe and whatever is in memory currently for the wasm game. Funny enough without some sort of screenshot tool on top of this I'm not sure the AI can actually 'see' the game at all.
Right on the nose. And to make that problem worse we've integrated a fair share of our lives into these devices, for which there is only 2 terrible choices. I can't tell you how many friends have expressed to me that they'd love to try GrapheneOS or get out of the mobile ecosystem entirely, but all of them use mobile apps for banking which effectively locks them in. It's basically the devil's bargain because we've added so much ease of use functionality to our day to day lives through these devices. In exchange Google is now showing us it was never ours to begin with.
I agree with your post however further info on one point:
> but all of them use mobile apps for banking which effectively locks them in
Many banking apps work fine with GOS. But given banking and money is such an important part of our lives it is easy to see why people might be hesitant.
It doesn't guarantee future compatibility.... but linked below is a GOS [banking app] status list, crowdsourced info by country.
No the negative externality here is that we've derived a value directly to this data, thereby negatively incentivizing this poor behavior. To further elucidate, it effectively introduces a cat-and-mouse game for the people who actually care about the data itself, they now have to worry about nonsensical third party behavior.
I think this is less a bait and switch and more just a legal liability shield. They're not saying you 'cant' use it that way. They just don't recommend you do, and they won't support you at all for doing so. Which I think is completely fair. Also, these two things aren't in contradiction. Deploying on prem does offer more security, but then it's up to you to use it correctly.
But the OSS license already absolves them of responsibility. This might just be to set the tone that security fixes won't be prioritized to the standard that they used to be.
> IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Is there a problem with providing other metrics like water? I didn't see that mentioned any where in the article. Not to be snarky, but your response kind of reminds me of this famous tweet: https://x.com/AustingrahamZ1/status/1029385497213366279?lang...
If you want to talk about water you're obviously free to do so, but you were the one to bring it up. Most of the articles I see about water usage in data centers seems to be propaganda as well. That's not to say data centers aren't consuming more water. I'm sure they are. Considering however that agriculture still accounts for over 70% of overall water usage and we're wasting a lot of it growing things like alfalfa in water hungry regions. Last I'd seen the metric data centers were estimated at around 6%. So I'd argue we should probably look at the worst offenders first.
Bringing up alfalfa (which is horrible) is the typical whataboutism: wasting water there doesn't make it right to waste fresh water for basically cat pictures and slop.
Sprinkling it with dismissing the water issue with "propaganda" and calling agriculture "worst offenders" (seriously? Nourishment is bad and 6% for data centres is insignificant?)...
I don't think I can even remotely agree.
It's funny to me that you would dismiss my point as a 'whataboutism' when it was an attempt to engage with your point about water, which was itself a whataboutism. I hope the irony isn't lost on you there.
Since you want to conflate nutrition with agriculture I'm happy to meet you there and bring it back to what the article was actually about, emissions. If we compare data center water intake and emissions to just the US beef industry alone, data centers are a very small drop in a very large pond. We're talking on the orders of almost 2000x the water usage and twice the emissions. And that's just beef, we could talk about avocados, bananas, or tons of other actual 'nutrients' that are an effective waste of water. But we like those things, just like we like cat pictures and slop (even though I'm not a fan of your reductionist comparison). I'm not saying you have to like it, but other's do. Just like some people like beef, and others will never touch it.
I'm actually not even disagreeing with you about the rise of data center consumption being something we should be monitoring. You're not wrong about that. But can we at least have an honest conversation about reality and get a little further than what all the headlines say. Maybe instead actually respond to the topic at hand and not make whataboutisms about water.
I can understand where you're coming from, but this seems a little misguided. Are you personally trying to pledge at least 1 full devs salary to Mozilla in exchange for less AI products? At the end of the day this really comes down to the money. If you want Mozilla to do the things you say you want from them, they need more than donations. Good will doesn't build a browser, that shit's expensive. It's like you're asking for a games studio to just give you an MMO out of the goodness of their heart for a few scraps from people who support their mission. The world doesn't work that way, without products like these I imagine Mozilla wouldn't be around much longer in the way you describe considering most of their salaries are paid directly by that 'poison' you describe.
Kind of makes me wonder how 'accelerated' the timeline of publishing this article was based upon the Claude Code leak today. Considering everyone has gotten a sneak peek at what Anthropic is working on OpenAI might be a little worried. This could also just be coincidence, but this piece really does read like self-encouraging fluff.
My question would be how do you know the position was a ghost position? Some companies genuinely leave roles open on their hiring pages for a while until they find a good fit some times. How do you differentiate between companies that are being picky and companies that are being obviously bad faith to the job market? This feels like it would just turn into crowdsourcing negative resentment from rejected candidates regardless of how real the position being offered actually is.
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