It is incredibly hard to make money going short. Even if you are right about the direction, most short positions require interest payments to hold, or have some sort of decay built into the structure. So timing is everything and even then, if the underlying security slowly grinds down (instead of a quick abrupt move) you could still lose if the interest/decay on the short position outruns the downward movement on the underlying.

I have been actively trading in the market for a little over a year now, and while winning on a short position is probably the most satisfying trade for me, the overwhelming majority of those trades are losses and at this point I mostly treat them as hedges. I suspect that is true for most market participants as well.

There's actually (at least) three things going against you going short:

- position has significant negative carry (what you're talking about there)

- stock/bond prices are nominal and the government constantly prints the denominator so prices tend to go up even if there's no actual growth

- for equities there is a genuine long term positive drift over time even if the denominator doesn't change

So yes, it's hard to make money going short and timing is everything

I think a lot of the hype is coming from content creators who are actually finding it useful for content creation. Generating ideas, organizing notes and research, writing scripts and articles, managing schedules, editing, promoting, etc...

I assume a lot of these folks were already using LLM's quite a bit, but were using the Chat interfaces or had workflows that were split among a bunch of different services and tools. Something like OpenClaw gave them a way to centralize a lot of that and also gave them a way to use natural language to direct efforts. So for them this probably feels like a big step change.

If you are coming from a programming background you were aware that this type of setup has been doable for a while, but you were probably content sticking with Claude code or similar tools because those tools covered most of your LLM based workflows quite well.

And tying this altogether, one of the lowest hanging fruits for content creators is to create content about the tools they are using. Doubly so if that particular tool is starting to go viral. So you end up with a self feeding virality of sorts, as OpenClaw got more popular, more content creators started using it, and then publishing content about it, etc....

For 99% of my use cases, Claude Code is the clear winner. So, when I tried to use OpenClaw to test it out, it just seemed like a worse, slower, less-capable version of Claude Code. And it is. I haven’t seen the use case where OpenClaw can really shine yet, but I’m sure it’s coming. Like others are saying, I’m willing to be convinced, but so far it hasn’t happened.

Ask it to do something in the future or something with a conditional, plain CC can't do that.

Like "message me when it is about to rain"

I got into a bike accident yesterday and injured both of my arms. Fortunately the damage wasn't too severe, but it was bad enough that using a computer is rather difficult. So now I'm spending some of my idle time playing around with different options for voice control. Like you I am a little wary of OpenClaw so I might try something similar to your setup as an alternative. So far I have gotten to the point where I can use voice dictation in notepad to write comments and commands, but copying and pasting the text is enough of a struggle (compounded by the fact that my cat is competing with me for the keyboard and I am in no state to fend her off) that I am aiming to push things a bit further. Sucks being injured but having a nice distraction to keep my mind occupied has so far been a great way to pass the time.

I have been assigning issues to copilot in Github. It will then create a pull request and work on and report back on the issue in the PR. I will pull the code and make small changes locally using VSCode when needed.

But what I like about this setup is that I have almost all the context I need to review the work in a single PR. And I can go back and revisit the PR if I ever run into issues down the line. Plus you can run sessions in parallel if needed, although I don't do that too much.

I have trouble sleeping, and it gets particularly bad in the winter. I have figured out that at least one of the triggers for poor sleep has been evening screen time. Redshift style apps help a little but barely. I can get away with some light usage of my phone on the dimmer settings, but if I sit down at my multi-monitor desk setup I will be wide awake all night and feel terrible in the morning. And this is with redshift and screens set to their lowest brightness levels.

So I spent a fair amount of time looking into e-ink options as a potential solution. I eventually settled on a refurbished Lenovo Thinkbook Plus G4, which has a flip-able screen with e-ink on one side. I paid around $800 which was less than a dedicated e-ink monitor, and only slightly more than some of the higher end large tablets/e-readers. So it was a hard deal to pass up.

I am happy to report that using the e-ink in the evenings has helped quite a bit on the sleep front. And while the laptop is pretty nice, e-ink in general requires a fair bit of compromise and the laptop in particular has some rough edges. You definitely need to spend some time on your display settings to make things work (high contrast, cursor and pointer visibility, font color in IDE and terminal apps, etc...), but for the most part I can make it work. And while I don't work in sunlight often, e-ink can really shine if you are outdoors (I have the sun shining on my screen right now as I type this and it is super readable.)

Anyways, I guess what I am trying to say is that I really hope more investment gets put into e-ink. I think it is a pretty awesome technology and would love to expand my usage of it. But at least for now it is mostly something that I am tolerating for the sake of sleep.

Best guess is that they were all caught up in the arms race to try and make a better model, at whatever the cost. And if you work in this space you were probably getting thrown fistfuls of money to join in on it. I read somewhere on reddit that anyone trying to push for efficiency at these places was getting ignored or pushed aside. DeepSeek had an incentive to focus on efficiency because of the chip embargo. So I don't think this is necessarily a knock on US AI capabilities. It is just that the incentives were different and when stock prices are going to the moon regardless of how much capex was getting spent, it was easy for everyone to just go along with it.

With that said, I think all of these companies are capable of learning from this and implementing these efficiency improvement. And I think the arms race is still on. The goal is to achieve super human level of intelligence, and they have a ways to go to get there. It is possible that these new efficiency improvements might even help them take the next step as they can now do a lot more with a lot less.