Funny you should say that
In the previous thread, Bob Mulroy said:
I keep wanting to subscribe to Grok, but it seems to be for entertainment only. It won’t pay bills, analyze investments, monitor my garden robot, or anything substantial.
I think it’ll read books for you and provide a teenager’s insight though.
Grok can’t, but OpenClaw can. The question is – do you really want it to?
I got in a conversation with someone I know the other day who is running an OpenClaw instance. It interested me enough that I’ve spent the afternoon asking Grok to explain how it works.
OpenClaw is a free program. It will run under Windows, Mac or Linux – but it’s by far better on Linux. Generally, you give it its own dedicated computer, phone chip, Gmail account and so on.
Then you give it tasks. Like, create a briefing first thing in the morning – say, all the stuff on your calendar, any meetings or appointments, the news headlines. You can ask it to scan for any new papers on your speciality and report back with a summary. It can find interesting items and write first drafts of blog posts (I swear I’m not doing this). It can separate the spam from the real emails.
Apparently, it really shines for large coding processes with multiple modules. Unlike a Grok or Claude that solves a particular problem and hands it back to you, OpenClaw monitors all the moving parts and remembers where you’ve been.
It learns from you and stores your preferences. It will take any tone you like. For the less technical user, you can communicate with it via WhatsApp(!) or any other messaging service.
It has what is described as a ‘heartbeat’ – a regular schedule on which it wakes up, does a job, passes the results to you and goes back to sleep. This article explains some of the things people use it for.
For a lot of things, it needs the help of another LLM – like Claude or GPT. For that, you pay. How much it costs depends on how much it needs. My acquaintance said when he ran it under Windows, it was costing £10 a day on tokens just to run its self-repair program. I think we’ve finally discovered how that AI companies plan to make their money back!
So unless you want it to buy movie tickets or make restaurant reservations for you, you’re better off sticking to lightweight Q&A with the free services. I sure would like to play with an instance for a while, though.
April 29, 2026 — 6:11 pm
Comments: 6
Hm. Not sure how I feel…
Behold, the living library. Give it a book and AI will read it, analyze it and answer your questions in the voice of that book.
It’s not a terrible idea. I don’t expect a very broad seam of wisdom to come from one book, no matter what it might be. I suspect what it is is a general AI that adopts the prose style of whatever book you choose.
I was having a high old time discussing office politics with Sun Tsu when I hit the wall:
Monthly
3-day free trial
£12.99 / month
Unlimited messages
Unlimited books
Cancel anytime
So I never found out what books are already in the database (it suggested Sun Tsu up front) and I don’t know if I get free time tomorrow after a reset.
Play with it. It’s kind of fun.
April 28, 2026 — 5:31 pm
Comments: 5
This is getting complicated
I had coffee with a college teacher this morning. She had three dissertations to read today. I asked if she was having problems with AI and she rolled her eyes.
She said it was easy to spot the ones out of ChatGPT: everything is bullet lists (you certainly learn to recognize its writing style, too). She asks students if they’ve used AI and if they ‘fess up, she tells them she doesn’t mind – but they have to take the AI text and put it back together, in paragraphs, in their own words, so she can see they comprehend the material.
She said the usual result is, they’ve mixed their words with AI words, resulting in a clunky stylistic mess.
The worst, though, are those who simply will not admit they used AI, when she can see perfectly well they’re lying. That leaves her with a dilemma: she is supposed to judge their character as well as their grasp of the material. Now what?
April 27, 2026 — 6:05 pm
Comments: 7
We’ll freeze, thanks
We’re getting toward the end of the cold season, but it’s still pretty chilly at night. Amazingly, 500 year old houses are not warm. I had a check of our home heating oil and it’s getting pretty low.
Last time we bought some, we paid £.53 a liter. They’re now asking £1.20. We have opted to bundle up in the daytime until Uncle B. fires up the stove in the evening.
What’s it going for where you be at, if you have oil central heat? (Also, have a good weekend!).
April 24, 2026 — 6:57 pm
Comments: 16
It made me unhappy
I just received a Steam notice that Into the Radius 2 is out of early access and up for sale. I shall not be buying it.
It’s a VR game. I played ItR1 and it was excellent. It takes place after some sort of…cataclysmic event. The landscape is a bizarre welter of floating cars and electrical hotspots and giant, crushing footprints from some invisible beast. I died a lot.
You have a home base and are sent out daily to retrieve items and hunt…entities. It’s very well done, but I realized after a while it was making me jumpy, even when I wasn’t playing. I guess it was the combination of VR and monsters that can sneak up on you fast. Plus, you had to find food and maintain your equipment. Plus, the whole landscape reset itself every…I want to say 24 hours. I don’t remember.
The best bit was the shooting range. You could try any of the very realistic guns and attachments on offer in the game for free and it was neutral territory – nothing could get you. I spent a lot of time in there. I honestly think it might’ve improved my marksmanship – except, of course, no recoil. Also I live in a place where I can’t have guns.
If you’re made of sterner stuff than I, this is probably a really great game. Maybe I’ll watch a playthrough.
April 23, 2026 — 6:38 pm
Comments: 2
World’s oldest nun turns 113
That is an old nun. Followed a link from Citizen Free Press. Speaking of which, did you see the link a few days ago about the FBI’s file on Bigfoot? It wasn’t terribly interesting (not one of my passions, bigfoot), but it linked to something called the FBI Reading Room.
It’s real – it’s an fbi.gov URL – and it’s supposedly stuff that has been released under the FOIA program. Holy poop – if you don’t find something in there that interests you, you’re dead to the world!
Ooo…I got as far as Al Gore Sr. before I had to stop for a look. So far, it’s J. Edgar Hoover being palsy with him.
As corrupt as they come. His favorite method of bribe-taking was a cattle auction on his farm (near unto where I grew up). All these shady characters would line up to pay thousands for a cow worth hundreds. My dad, who was in government in a small way, always boasted, “I never bought the cow!”
April 22, 2026 — 6:05 pm
Comments: 6
I am consumed with techlust
I sat next to someone using one of these today – a reMarkable tablet. By the time you’ve added a case and stylus and other necessaries, it’s upwards of £500. These days, I don’t do anything that would come close to justify it. And what really put me off is finding out you need a monthly subscription to take full advantage of the features (I refuse to step onto the subscription model).
But it’s slick stuff. You can make notes in the usual way and it will type them up for you. You can connect it to your phone and move documents back and forth. I don’t know what it does for drawing cleanup – man’s a lawyer, I don’t think he doodles much – but it would be interesting to know.
I mean, there are cheaper alternatives, but the truth is – I would probably play with one for a few hours and then put it away in a drawer forever.
April 21, 2026 — 5:50 pm
Comments: 5
Yes, I ruined the surprise
Jaws bath bomb. Amazon link. Original tweet. You can count on the Japanese.
I stopped buying fancy bath bombs. So many of them have things like lavender or flower petals in them, and when they float to the surface, it feels like I’m soaking in a tub full of bugs.
April 20, 2026 — 4:53 pm
Comments: 6
I’m going to be that old lady
A 91-year-old lady in Cleveland failed to respond to an automated wellness check. After which, she failed to respond to a human dispatcher call. The police called her daughter and found that, yes, she should be home and answering the phone.
The police did a check and she didn’t come to the door. Concerned, they walked in, and…she was playing a video game and trying desperately to beat her own personal best.
I bet she was pissed.
It was a game called Super Bubble Pop (pictured). And she was super into it.
According to the article, 36% of Americans aged 80-90 play video games weekly, but she was 91 so I guess it doesn’t count.
Have a good weekend, everyone!
April 17, 2026 — 4:35 pm
Comments: 7
Do chickens have feelings?
That’s the question posed by Backyard Chickens Magazine and the answer is duh.
They’re emotional wrecks, are chickens. They’re scatty and fearful; they mourn the missing, they cheer when you come around the corner. They’re the most emotional animals I’ve ever interacted with. And they have real, discoverable language for all of it, too.
It’s heartbreaking to watch Sam pecking around the garden and calling to his friends when he finds something tasty.
There’s no one to come.
April 16, 2026 — 6:17 pm
Comments: 11