Hacker News: eastendguy

New comment by eastendguy in "Operator research preview"

eastendguy — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 20:27:36 +0000

In the last weeks I experimented with Claude Computer Use to automate some daily tasks (via its Ui.Vision chat integration, see https://forum.ui.vision/t/v9-5-0-brings-computer-use-ai-chat... ) - and the results are mixed. Claude gets things wrong way too often to be useful.

Has anyone done any comparison Claude Computer Use vs OpenAI Operator? Is it signifcantly better?

New comment by eastendguy in "Computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku"

eastendguy — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 08:59:00 +0000

100% this. I am using the open source Ui.vision to automate some business tasks. Works well, but only 10% of the work is for automating the main workflow, 90% of the work goes into error and edge case handling (e. g. Internet down, website (to scrape data from) down, some input data has typos or the wrong date format, etc).

A human can work around all these error cases once she encounters them. Current RPA tools like Uipath or ui.vision need explicit programming for every potential situation. And I see no indication that Claude is doing any better than this.

For starters, for visual automation to work reliably the OCR quality needs to improve further and be 100% reliable. Even in that very basic "AI" area, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini are good, but not good enough yet.

New comment by eastendguy in "More Than Half of Teslas Are Being Traded in for Gas Cars"

eastendguy — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 15:10:51 +0000

"there’s not much left to innovate"

???

Totally disagree. Just one example: Tesla has only two global mass market models (3+Y). There is plenty of room to innovate on this topic alone. Model 2? Model whatever. Nothing new in years.

New comment by eastendguy in "More Than Half of Teslas Are Being Traded in for Gas Cars"

eastendguy — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 14:13:56 +0000

Wow, what a click-baity misleading headline. Key point is that this number is going down:

"The big news is that more and more people are opting to trade their Teslas for an EV from a legacy automaker"

This might be me in a few years. Tesla stopped being innovative years ago. No surprise, its CEO is high on drugs most of the time and spends his days (and nights) posting childish memes.

New comment by eastendguy in "EU science advisers back call for a 'CERN for AI' to aid research"

eastendguy — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 13:00:05 +0000

(1) AI:

What you said is all correct, but there are some positive steps as well, for example ELLIS: https://ellis.eu/

ELLIS is a great way to compete with the top US universities. Much more is needed, especially access to computing power, just as the CERN for AI proposal suggests.

(2) EU research:

EU research funding itself is a success:

https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/statement-erc-scienti...

New comment by eastendguy in "Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models"

eastendguy — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 13:37:52 +0000

If browser extensions could access the local LLMs - Now THAT would be a very cool feature.

Imagine what (test) automation extensions like Selenium IDE or Ui.vision could do then. Or translation extensions. Or.... so many cool options.

New comment by eastendguy in "Show HN: Autotab – An AI-powered Chrome extension to create Selenium scripts"

eastendguy — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 13:01:00 +0000

> and debug if it errors or isn't what you wanted.

That is a potential problem Because at this point the user will still need good HTML/Selenium/coding knowledge to debug. We ran into the same issue using chatgpt generated scripts for ui.vision. Once a QA person has to figure out why some generated code does not work, it becomes a hassle and removes any initial advantage over the classic record & replay approach.

New comment by eastendguy in "Germany opposes client-side scanning planned by EU"

eastendguy — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 14:09:04 +0000

And your source for this statement is which Telegram group?

New comment by eastendguy in "Germany opposes client-side scanning planned by EU"

eastendguy — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 14:00:49 +0000

What has a "German copyright cease and desist" to do with privacy, or the lack of privacy? And who is "them"? A few sources and details instead of just ranting would be useful.

New comment by eastendguy in "AutoHotkey v2 Official Release Announcement"

eastendguy — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 08:49:33 +0000

Ui.Vision dekstop automation is cross-platform works on Linux and macOS (and Windows). It is not exactly the same, though.

New comment by eastendguy in "Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now"

eastendguy — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 19:54:22 +0000

Wow, Twitter is collapsing much faster than I expected. With PG and some other high-profile accounts gone, many will loose interest in their Twitter feed fast. Rinse and repeat.

New comment by eastendguy in "Winter & Cold Weather EV Range Loss in 7,000 Cars"

eastendguy — Sun, 18 Dec 2022 17:05:58 +0000

> I could charge at home, but don’t have a garage

No problem (why should it?)

> BEVs are improving quickly so what I buy might be superseded soon

That WAS my concern, but EV resale value is amazingly stable, better than most ICE in my area (EU). After all, EVs are still cars, so innovation cycles are long (many years).

New comment by eastendguy in "Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is now available to anyone in North America"

eastendguy — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 13:11:08 +0000

Why? FSD even in its current state will save lives. Think of it as driver-assist on steroids.

New comment by eastendguy in "How crypto goes to zero"

eastendguy — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 11:58:32 +0000

I'd rather pay with Bitcoin/ETH/xx than using Mastercard. Currently 1-2 big US companies have ALL my payment data, they know everything about my life. Is this good?

Privacy is the killer feature for crypto. Or is there another non-crypto solution to this problem?

New comment by eastendguy in "Twitter to employees: all office buildings closed, badge access suspended"

eastendguy — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 09:58:05 +0000

So, what other car (that I can buy now) gives me the same range?

New comment by eastendguy in "Web automation: Don't use Selenium, use Playwright"

eastendguy — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 12:46:50 +0000

Yes! Recording xpath works fine in many cases, but once something on the website changes you are left with this auto-generated Xpath that you do not know how to change. Maintaining such a test is a nightmare and a waste of brain-cycles.

New comment by eastendguy in "Web automation: Don't use Selenium, use Playwright"

eastendguy — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 12:42:40 +0000

I hate XPaths with a passion. They are powerful but a waste of time. The easiest solution is to use visual automation tools like UI Vision (web browser) or Sikuli (desktop). There you write something like "click: login" - and the word login is found not by parsing the DOM, but by using OCR.

Obviously such an automation runs much slower than any Selenium based automation, but it its sooo much easier to create and maintain, especially on complex websites with tons of Javascript and frameworks. I believe this is the future of causal (test) automation.

New comment by eastendguy in "In Europe, the bird will fly by our EU rules"

eastendguy — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 13:03:53 +0000

> they're appointed by national governments.

...which are elected.

So if you want e. g. a right-wing EU commissioner just vote for your local right-wing party. It is that easy.

New comment by eastendguy in "Robot Framework: generic open source automation framework"

eastendguy — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 16:54:12 +0000

"Not being able to code" is not black and white. Many can follow basic steps, as long as it gets not too complex. Thus "Low code" tools like Powerautomate,selenium ide, ahk or UIvision are great for people to do test automation. They are a quick way to create an automation. And many users learn/start to code this way.

New comment by eastendguy in "Proxy Chrome extensions are not going to be usable in MV3"

eastendguy — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 18:58:12 +0000

There is an easy alternative: Use Firefox