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0 pointssilversmith24d ago0 comments

I guess we are just boring and/or unimaginative. I don't get that many communications per day to require an abstraction level between me and the messages. The daily automations I need are more efficiently carried out by home assistant / n8n. I'm not in a position where I need automated briefs on every new company started in my area. I genuinely don't see how it could benefit me.

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dg2fgfg24d ago

Most humans are unimaginative because to be imaginative is actually really, really hard. People are also incredibly overly optimistic about their own ideas etc... until they go through the craftsmanship of producing something great.

Most peoples thought process is "oh great idea, just gotta do this and that and out pops something that'll improve peoples lives". Erm no... its nothing like that in reality.

theshrike7923d ago

n8n can't handle abiguity, unless you program it to.

Like if you want bad weather alerts, you need to specifically define every situation of "bad weather" by givin exact weather / wind / rain limits.

What happens if it's cold, windy and rainy, but every value is juust 0.1 over the threshold of notifying you? It's still objectively shit weather.

Or can n8n go through your emails and check for promo codes or sales you're looking for - in ad mails that are 90% images with text?

silversmithOP23d ago

I'd counter that n8n (or most other workflow tools) can handle as much ambiguity as OpenClaw - it has a LLM call node. Stuff the ambiguous parts in there, but don't burn a rainforests worth of compute figuring out how to call the weather API each and every time.

Also, in the olden days of pre-AI, if our weather workflow did not notify us because conditions juuust failed to be met, we adjusted the thresholds. Uphill, both ways.

Don't get me wrong, I use a bunch of LLMs for automations. By prompting the model "here is what I want to achieve, here are the tools I have, figure out how to stitch them together". Actual workflows run (mostly) deterministically, with a sprinkling of "classify this image" or "summarize this text" nodes thrown in for a good measure.

theshrike7923d ago

So what you have here is n8n-claw :)

bionaut23d ago

It is not lack of imagination, it is the lack of the social need for the performative aspect of an assistant.

There are all these douchebags that use to have to hire a human assistant in order to tell other douchebags that they have an assistant.

Now every wanna be douchebag can just get a mac mini. Of course, that is going to be super popular.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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dg2fgfg24d ago

Most peoples thought process is "oh great idea, just gotta do this and that and out pops something that'll improve peoples lives". Erm no... its nothing like that in reality.

theshrike7923d ago

n8n can't handle abiguity, unless you program it to.

Like if you want bad weather alerts, you need to specifically define every situation of "bad weather" by givin exact weather / wind / rain limits.

What happens if it's cold, windy and rainy, but every value is juust 0.1 over the threshold of notifying you? It's still objectively shit weather.

Or can n8n go through your emails and check for promo codes or sales you're looking for - in ad mails that are 90% images with text?

silversmithOP23d ago

Also, in the olden days of pre-AI, if our weather workflow did not notify us because conditions juuust failed to be met, we adjusted the thresholds. Uphill, both ways.

theshrike7923d ago

So what you have here is n8n-claw :)

bionaut23d ago

It is not lack of imagination, it is the lack of the social need for the performative aspect of an assistant.

There are all these douchebags that use to have to hire a human assistant in order to tell other douchebags that they have an assistant.

Now every wanna be douchebag can just get a mac mini. Of course, that is going to be super popular.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse