Zclaw – The 888 KiB Assistant

“888 KiB Assistant” but the assistant itself is a multi terabyte rental-only model stored in some mysterious data center.

For people who don't get this: it's a Home Assistant type thing. You don't do inference on it, you send it a message on Telegram and it does things with physical things through GPIO. You could use a $140 Raspberry Pi with 8GB RAM and host a local model on it plugged into 30W AC power... or you could use a $10 ESP32 which can run for weeks on a tiny battery, and your existing Wifi connection with a cheap cloud model (cloud models are as cheap as $0.02/1MTokens). This makes it easier to ramp up on new ESP32 projects. You can just tell it to do things / give you info, rather than having to write code.

Me: "GPIO 5 can be active for a maximum of 100ms, then it needs to cool down for at least 1s. Otherwise the MOSFET is fried."

Zclaw: "GPIO 5 is active now, however the server is not responding so I'm awaiting further instructions."

I fail to understand why 888 KiB matters if it's just a wrapper around a cloud api.

888KiB is quite large, but I see they're including the whole rest of the firmware in that number, fair enough. Their actual application code weighs only 35,742 bytes, compiled.

Still lightyears from a one-bit AI assistant. Send 1 to save the humankind, 0 to exterminate. And hurry up because it's in undefined state right now!

There are many concerns and areas for improvement with open claw and other similar projects (continuous loop script with broad OS access that manages your agents and interfaces with a standard messaging app)

However, file size I have never seen on that list. I would rather offer for something that is even bigger in file size so it afford certain functionality like better security tighter permissions however it would do that.

Clicked on this expecting to see a crontab file.

The domain crashed and burned or something, hopefully this link is correct:

https://github.com/tnm/zclaw

There is the same divide starting to form that NFTs had back in the day. Tech bros instantly like if something has claw in the name, the rest of us will dismiss anything with that naming and philosophy as toxic slop culture. will be interesting to see how far this one will go.

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