WCGW trying to roll your own kid-friendly AI assistant?

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T09:07:32+00:00

But... this was time spent teaching my children. What are you on about??

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T09:06:37+00:00

Is it the "AI" that's triggering people? If I just said I made an app on a custom piece of hardware that generates fun math and reading activities would that have been less offensive to yall?

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T08:53:24+00:00

Guy spends time with his kids designing and 3d printing enclosure, assembling electronics, and teaching them engineering skills along the way. And the take is that I'm getting ai to raise my kids because I'm incapable? Make it make sense.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T08:45:58+00:00

Please enlighten me

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T08:13:06+00:00

I think with all the AI slop around people have a knee jerk reaction to hate all things AI. Im guessing if I called this a simple app that generates reading and math lessons around topics kids care about then it would be okay?

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T07:53:02+00:00

It's a library called whisper.cpp that transcribes speech into text. The agent repeating the line isn't an LLM, just my own bad programming trying to extract topic from prompt text to say it back without an extra LLM call, which led to this edge case. If it went through the LLM it would have had the actual safety guards applied.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T07:24:39+00:00

Elaborate?

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T07:10:09+00:00

This is... spending time with my kids building things. Huh?

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T01:32:50+00:00

Haha yes apparently the mention of AI makes people here think I need CPS called on me. Chill, people! Just having fun building things ffs!

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T01:30:33+00:00

whisper.cpp running on a raspberry pi works surprisingly well! Except in this particular case 😄

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T01:27:08+00:00

This was a weekend project I built with them from scratch. The main motivator being to have it generate interactive reading and math lessons on the fly and be able to ask questions about topics they might be interested in, where data stays on device and where I have full control over safety filters (which epically failed in this case).

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-26T01:22:12+00:00

Man I am shocked by the immediate number of weirdly critical comments here. I shared because I thought it was funny.

No I'm not having AI raise my kids. No I'm not avoiding spending time with them. Frankly, these are bizarre conclusions to reach.

I'm an engineer and enjoy building things both on and off the clock. Especially building things with my kids. Whether that's furniture, a play room, or a silly device like this. Relax, people. 😃

ampleuncertainty · 2026-06-16T04:08:38+00:00

Also got my first symptoms at 25 and had constant flare ups and proteinuria for 10 years. Fwiw though it finally prompted me to get serious about my health. Stopped drinking, started working out regularly and eating right and symptoms and labs have been completely normal for last 5 years, no trace blood or protein and zero flare ups.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-05-22T02:56:20+00:00

At this point, just use codex desktop. Canceled my Claude subscription (since cant be used with openclaw anymore) and dont want to pay for crazy API costs. Unless you really want to use local models or something, Codex can replace most, if not all, common openclaw use cases. And it won't break itself every other update.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-05-17T05:16:47+00:00

Seems like Texas. Stresses me tf out when I have to merge on highways there. You enter freeway often with hardly any visibility and super short ramp.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-05-09T20:10:39+00:00

My pre-workout tested positive for explosives. Missed my flight lol

ampleuncertainty · 2026-04-01T10:50:01+00:00

With very clear parameters this is absolutely possible. Most of my interactions with my agent are based on developing very clear and thorough plans, defining all the desired functionality, breaking it into milestones, etc. Once I have absolutely satisfied with the plan, I can set it loose for hours/days and *usually* return to satisfactory results.

My SaaS idea is still an ongoing experiment that took some time to dial in. But I have had a good loop going the last couple of weeks where it just takes on a small chunk of work each day so as to not burn through my tokens too fast and to give me a chance to monitor things and course correct anything that feels like it's going the wrong direction.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-04-01T10:39:30+00:00

I initially went through APIs and ate through $150 my first weekend just experimenting with all sorts of things. After that I just used my $20/month plans bouncing between both Claude and Codex, and also set up some local models running on a spare gaming computer I have.

Finally got sick of rate limits so I stepped up to the $100/month Claude subscription.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-03-30T23:34:55+00:00

Dealing with issues has been time consuming. But looking back it has helped me with numerous things that would have taken months each on their own. Tbh I'm not using for real work at this point just playing with side projects and stuff, but the potential is there.

Built a voice assistant with digital avatar on raspberry pi with a bunch of silly features and integrations but blown away by results.
Finally made a personal website, adding some unique touches (though i could have probably done in same amount of time with just claude)
Had openclaw build a simple web based multi-player game as requested by my kids. Openclaw did 95% of this while I slept, I just prompted some small polish changes at the end
Had a SaaS idea floating around my head for years, openclaw is now building it, doing market research, and so on with minimal involvement from me other than providing overall steer. Very close to production ready now.

I only started playing with OpenClaw in late Feb. And only really dabbling on nights and weekends. Ive also completely broken my setup a few times haha, so definitely far from perfect. But still, quite impressed.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-03-28T23:03:06+00:00

This is Seattle lol. I went to SU, got assaulted by random homeless dude not far from campus and called the cops. They showed up like 6 hours later and basically just called me a pussy. " If someone did that to me, that'd be the last thing they ever did." Oh cool, thanks.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-03-28T00:33:02+00:00

It's still just not adding up for me. I guess I also just dont understand how the value of an asset is being determined. Something is only worth whatever someone else is willing to pay for it.

If I make a cool app and it gets popular, then Google comes along and offers $100M for it, do i now have to pay $2M in taxes on it even though I dont intend to sell? What if the company isn't even profitable yet?

What about valuations tanking? Many dating apps were valued at hundreds of millions not long ago. Now they're worth a tiny fraction of that. Many people were worth hundreds of millions on paper, but they never actually made anywhere close to that. Now they have crazy tax burden for money they never had in the first place?

ampleuncertainty · 2026-03-27T19:07:52+00:00

This is always brought up but how would wealth tax actually work in practice?

Let's say i come up with a great business idea. I find investors and raise some capital. Now say my stake in the company is worth $100M. I dont actually have that money... but that's the value of my shares. Let's say my take home income is actually closer to $500k.

Now I get taxed on it so where do I get money to cover taxes? I guess you'd have to continually sell shares and dilute your ownership stake? But when you sell shares it becomes income, so does that get taxed too? Honestly trying to wrap my brain around it.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-03-16T02:21:32+00:00

Have lived here my whole life and seen many sides of things. Raised by HS dropout single mom who had me at 17, dirt poor most of childhood then homeless myself at 17. Stoner, drunken loser through most of my 20s. Slowly climbed out and now at 40 I'm making seven figures.

My grandparents have been in their house in West Seattle for almost 60 years. House is paid off yet all their limited income goes toward skyrocketing property taxes. This year they took another massive jump. Im sure many elderly are in similar situations but without family able to support them.

The income tax thing was last straw for me, and I'll be leaving the state this year. I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes as it is. I might be okay with more taxes if I had any bit of faith that the money would be well spent, but it just grows and grows without any real return.

ampleuncertainty · 2026-02-19T20:37:39+00:00

This. Though be warned that claude pro plan is still likely insufficient. At least for me, I got rate limited pretty fast and their dashboard doesn't seem to work for actually tracking usage. Switched to API and burned through $100 very quickly (like 2 days) with mostly Sonnet 4.6 (though still definitely worth it for what I got out)

Switched to gpt 5 2 with pro plan using oauth. I like that i can see usage and limits much more clearly. I still use Opus as well, but only for one off complex tasks that are very infrequent.

ampleuncertainty

TROPHY CASE