It's a personal project, but inspired by OpenClaw (which I find way overhyped), I am building an ambient intelligence layer for investment finance including a 3-tiered memory architecture, sensors (for environment scanning), skills, reasoning agents, and a new agentic UI concept only for that purpose.
I reached the same conclusion. I tried using both for my personal investment ambient using agent-pair programming to build and agentic intelligence layer for stocks and the difference between the 2 models if astounding.
Witness all of the people who, when you suggest that there is demand for open hardware products, show up to tell you that ordinary people don't care about that so STFU nerd. As if they're afraid someone would actually offer it.
The problem, of course, is that ordinary people don't care at first, because at first the collar is only installed around your neck and not yet used to shock you, and people with no eye for the future say, what's the big deal? It's just a collar.
It's only after they're around enough necks that people start getting zapped for modifying the OS, but even then some people will say, it's for your own good, why are you defending "hackers"?
Then people start getting shocked for trying to compete with the incumbents or expressing unpopular opinions, but by that point every device without a collar is some kind of obscure Linux Phone with a high price and low specs.
Now you're at the point where all someone has to do is make a competitive device which is otherwise identical to the one they were going to make anyway but it doesn't come with a shock collar and ordinary people will want it because they're tired of getting screwed. But the same critics will show up to say that ordinary people don't care about that and point to the fact that they didn't when it was first being rolled out and nobody was getting electrocuted yet.
Right? They're asking that question on a forum dedicated to the subject that has been around for nearly two decades. The entirety of Silicon Valley was born in people's garages. Not really sure where it's meant to come back from
The problem is that the 'developers' you are seeing today are not the same from the 90s that have that hacker mindset and curiosity.
Instead, it has been hijacked by those who have never opened a PC before or were never interested in the field to begin with and saw it as a VC vehicle get-rich-quick scheme infiltrated by tons of grifters.
Once the money dries up post-extraction then they (grifters) abandon the field to the true 'hackers' still in the field doing clever projects like this one.
To me, the difference is that "hackers" has become focused on software. The early days in SV they had to invent the hardware. Now, hardware is commodity, and it has a novel idea for a hardware hacker to make the news. The Zuck hacked his first iterations of what became Facebook together. Apps like Snapchat and what not are just software hacked together using the hardware in novel ways. Things like Flipper0 are interesting hardware from hackers. Some interesting things find their way to the crowd funding sites that ultimately die on the vine. Sites for 3D printing show there are still some mechanical hardware types that still tinker.
Overall, it just shows that the hacker ethos never went any where. It's just younger people being exposed and thinking it's something new.
It was a different company back then. The Internet was still new-ish and not the multi-trillion dollar company it is now. I'd think expectations are different.
That’s the lesson we should be learning, but I’m worried the lesson we’re actually learning <sees 18yo crypto bro drive by in a Lamborghini> is that regulations hinder innovation.
In that sense, at least for me, it was a third place where we could roam to get inspired and connect. We lost that. I was in Akihabara last weekend. And its the same in a way. While there are still a few, most tech stores are now phone/laptop stores that don't sell parts. Making the hunt for tech really boring.
There are a few stores left that sell parts in Akihabara, but only a few and they're not that easy to find. Akihabara now is mostly a place to go to maid cafes.
It’s pretty much for the same reasons. All those stores and types of stores that used to be in SF, Cambridge, Tokyo are all found in Shenzen now. That’s where the critical mass is.
What is interesting about OpenClaw is it's architecture. It is like an ambient intelligence layer. Other approaches up until now have been VSCode or Chromium based integrations into the PC layer.
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