Like an 8GB local LLM? Surely that's what you mean. 100watts an hour sure beats $20 a night.

And if only you could set a reminder on one, even based on this reliable time telling.

Impossible though, better just load $1000 into my Definitely Not a Scam Ai to remember to buy milk, or whatever.

All these comments are missing the goal here was to learn how to use that AI tool, which obviously not using the AI tool would not accomplish.

Yes the entire thing is idiotic, but it's disingenuous to say he could have used an alarm instead. No, using an alarm would not achieve the goal of learning how the AI tool works by giving it a simple task.

A much more laughable fact is that the guy couldn't even write his post without an LLM doing it for him.

I hesitate to defend this guy, but the way to learn to do complex things with a tool is to learn to do simple things with it. it's fully defensible to say that LLMs are not a valid tool to use, but it's not accurate to represent him as thinking that having his stupid bot check the time every half hour is a good use of his money; he's just fucking around so he can learn things and attract attention.

How many noodle calories are equal to one potato calorie?

But a simple reminder is so... impersonable...

Why settle for a basic reminder when you could have a personal AI agentic assistant tailored toward your needs to remind you things like "buy milk" or "wash your hands after going to the bathroom"?

Your personal AI agentic assistant gets to know you on a deeper level, learning your preferences and adjusting to your unique needs, so that it feels more like having a loyally devoted butler to gently wake you and remind you to wipe your ass.

Some day, as the technology matures, maybe your personal AI agentic assistant will even wipe your ass for you, or buy your milk. But only after washing its hands in between!

-him, probably

It only makes sense if it was checking for it being daytime (i.e. after sunrise and before sunset) which you cannot do in cron, rather than check for a specific hour.

Even then, using an LLM is about the stupidest way imaginable to do it since it's not as if "when is it sunrise/sunset at a specific latitude and longitude and day of the year" can't just be calculated with a formula or looked up in a table of values - its not as if the sunrise and sunset hours given latitude, longitude and day of the year change from year to year.

Doubt he used the term cron job correctly. He didn’t setup up an actual cronjob and even if he did he probably let the LLM set it up for him.

programming nitpicks (for the lack of better word) that I used to hear:

• "don't use u32, you won't need that much data"
• "don't use using namespace std"
• "sqrt is expensive, if necessary cache it outside loop"
• "I made my own vector type because the one from standard lib is inefficient"

then this person implemeting time checking work via LLM over network and costs $0.75 each check lol

Nooo you don't understand. It needs it to be wrong up to 60% of the time. He would need a broken clock, a window and a post it note.

Or if your being fancy poll a time server

For the clicks.

And the AI companies are still losing money after charging 75c!

Definitely wrote a paragraph and asked an LLM to summarize it.

It even repeats the punchline, word-for-word.

He told it to remind him to get milk the next day. The artificial stupidity set up a cron job to check if it was "tomorrow" every so often before it reminded him. He's a moron for paying for a completely wasteful stupid system that wasted his money.

A fool and his money are soon parted

Open claw is an agenic AI agent that interfaces with LLMs to do stuff like this. Apparently in the dumbest way possible.

feel like I'm having an aneurism reading this.

You accurately described what I was feeling too. Like, it was so atrocious to read, because I wanted to figure out what he was talking about and understand it, when I knew that it didn't make sense and he was an idiot. But I kept rereading it because I wanted to be wrong and realize what he really meant.

But no, he's just a fucking idiot. He's on twatter, so it makes sense...

Also extrapolated a maximum of 3-4 sentences into several paragraphs somehow

You can even ask google AI to set that alarm (although the non LLM based assistant it replaced would probably do it more reliably). This is a case of idiotic "AI in a while loop can do everything" thinking without checking if it makes sense.

Instructions Unclear.

Used ChatGPT to set up a Home Assistant instance to set up a light sensor to tell me how to point it at the window. Then asked it how to set up an LLM agent to check HA to see if it is bright out to send an alert to pushbullet.

At least with the hooker you can get a hug, ai doesn't even do that

why are we punching down on sex workers now? sex work is real work…

drug dealer? sure

amway? sure

… adobe? sure

but there’s nothing inherently untrustworthy about sex work and sex workers

He's shaking a bowling ball expecting an 8ball answer

LLM: $20 per day and 49104503 gallons of water

Clock app on cell phone: free

If you charged the kids $0.75 each time they said it, it would be a quieter trip.

We've also done pretty good with stuff like electronic datebooks and appointment reminders pretty much since computers were invented.

He didn't even conclude the obvious because his better solution is still the same shit. 14 hours a day of asking an LLM "is it daylight yet?", which the LLM itself needs to figure out, since it doesn't have eyes, might not even be running in the same timezone, and even then, it changes from day to day depending on your latitude (and might not happen for months if you're close enough to either pole). And whatever method the LLM uses, you can just do that directly yourself without buying any tokens.

Funny part, I just prompted Llama 4 Scout "I need to know if it is daylight yet." And it said it would need to know my location but suggested alternatives like checking local time vs sunrise/sunset times, checking a weather app, or the final bullet: "Look outside!" So even if he had asked an LLM for how to solve this problem, it might have given him a better solution than what he ended up with, even with his improvements.

Also, daylight is irrelevant for "remind me to do x tomorrow". If it was trying to avoid reminding him at midnight, it could just pick whatever arbitrary time to display the day's reminders or base it on when he's moving around or leaving the home if it wants to be fancy (though seriously, you should figure that shit out yourself to avoid having to optimize a "is it daylight yet?" loop because your LLM was designed to use more tokens to get things done (no idea if that's the case for OpenClaw).