Claude Duet

The best way around this is a project folder like "Personal" or something contextual, then getting Claude to record everything into md files with semantic indexing. It doesn't require too much space. Just a little background processing.

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

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 :)

Technically-minded people have a responsibility to either:

1. Contribute to improving these systems in some way 2. Find ways to legally and efficiently shorten, circumvent or outsource them

There are other far more pleasant and productive ways to embrace a new language and community. Diving in to red tape is not one.

He didn't say he gonna live there. He could be buying the house for investment.

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 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.

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!

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 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?

I wouldn't give Anthropic this much access to my life, because frankly they haven't built up enough trust. Google have been pretty good for decades so I'd me much more likely to trust them. I'm sure they're working on something identical that will likely be able to take better advantage over integration into Android, Chrome, Gmail, etc.

It doesn't remotely hit the same way.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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).

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.

If you want to get started, I'd recommend just finding one thing to automate, and do what's necessary to get to that point. Once you've got that going, you can iterate.

For me, the thing I started with was the train tracking.

- In order to get train tracking working, it needed email access to get my trips.

- To get my email, I sync my email inboxes to a local IMAP server

- To check train times, it needs access to a train data API, I got an API key from realtimetrains.

- To apply for train delay compensation, it needs access to a browser, so I set up camoufox.

- It needs to log in to the compensation portal, so I set up a 1Password vault and gave it access to select credentials.

- To send me updates, it needs a gateway, so I set up a WhatsApp bridge.

So at this point, I've got an agent that can read my emails, browse the web, and chat to me over WhatsApp. Once you've got all that going, it becomes much easier to iterate and add new things.

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.

In a sense, I get it because they are not always the most fun part of life, but it seems odd to me to want to automate away every single little inconvenience of your life away.